Author: News Room
Kenneth Walker, an Emmy Award-winning journalist whose reporting for the ABC News program “Nightline” helped bring the brutality of South Africa’s racist apartheid system to the attention of the American public, propelling it onto the agenda of U.S. policymakers, died on April 11 in Washington. He was 73.His cousin and executor, Jeff Brown, said his death, in a hospital, was caused by a heart attack. It was not widely reported at the time.Mr. Walker’s weeklong coverage of South Africa’s often brutal policy of racial segregation — produced for “Nightline” with Ted Koppel, the program’s anchor, and a team of reporters…
A prominent Silicon Valley investor is in a bitter dispute with his former employer, one of the world’s largest asset managers, accusing it of fraud and attempted bribery.In a lawsuit filed on Thursday in California, Josh Raffaelli, who until late last year was a fund manager at Brookfield Asset Management, said the company had mistreated investors in his funds as it sought to make up for losses in other parts of its business.The 100-page complaint is notable in part because Mr. Raffaelli has close ties to Elon Musk, the world’s richest man. That relationship enabled Mr. Raffaelli’s funds to put…
President Trump announced on Thursday that the United States intended to sign a trade deal with Britain that would bring the two nations closer and roll back some of the punishing tariffs he issued on that country’s products.Both sides consider a trade pact deeply beneficial, and a deal has been under discussion since Mr. Trump’s first term. But the announcement on Thursday was still short on details, reflecting the haste of the Trump administration’s efforts to negotiate with more than dozen nations and rework the global trading system in a matter of months.The agreement, which Mr. Trump said would be…
The United States and Britain announced on Thursday that they had reached a deal that would reduce tariffs on some imports, such as steel, cars and ethanol, and deepen the economic relationship between the two countries.There was plenty of mutual congratulating between President Trump in the Oval Office and Keir Starmer, the British prime minister, who dialed in on a speakerphone. “This is a really fantastic, historic day,” Mr. Starmer said.As the dust settled, though, it became clearer that this was just a framework for a deal and there could be weeks, if not more, of additional negotiations before it…
A first-of-its-kind bill to regulate parts of the cryptocurrency industry stalled in the Senate on Thursday, after Democrats blocked it amid concerns in their party about how President Trump and his family are profiting from crypto.On a vote of 48 to 49, the measure failed to muster the 60 votes necessary to advance. It would have regulated so-called stablecoins, a type of cryptocurrency tied to the value of an existing asset, often the U.S. dollar. The vote was a setback for the industry, which has made significant advances in Washington with the backing of Mr. Trump and a bipartisan group…
More than 20 times during a roughly 45-minute news conference on Wednesday, Jerome H. Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, referenced the idea of waiting to see how President Trump’s policies would ripple through the economy before taking any action on interest rates.Mr. Powell, who spoke after the Fed opted to extend a pause on interest rate cuts, said the central bank had the flexibility to do so because the economy overall was still on solid footing. He also stressed that it was the most prudent decision at a time when there was so much uncertainty about how much…
On Sunday morning, as Holly LaFavers was preparing to go to church, a delivery worker dropped off a 25-pound box of lollipops in front of her apartment building in Lexington, Ky.And another. And then another. Soon, 22 boxes of 50,600 lollipops were stacked five boxes high in two walls of Dum-Dums. That was when Ms. LaFavers heard what no parent wants to hear: Her child had unwittingly placed a massive online order.“Mom, my suckers are here!” said her son, Liam, who had gone outside to ride his scooter.“I panicked,” Ms. LaFavers, 46, said. “I was hysterical.”Ms. LaFavers said in an…
Donald Trump is the face of these cuts, but the cruelty of his administration is not the only story. After leaping upward in the 2000s, global giving for health grew very slowly through the 2010s. The culture of philanthropy has changed somewhat, too, with the age of the Giving Pledge — in which hundreds of the world’s richest people promised to donate more than half of their great fortunes to charity — yielding first to the upstart movement called Effective Altruism and then to a new age of extreme wealth defined less by altruism than by grandiosity. After the Gateses’…
Do you care where a diamond comes from?Historically, consumers didn’t have a choice. Natural diamonds were formed billions of years ago, deep beneath the earth’s surface, and were then thrust hundreds of kilometers to its crust by volcanic eruptions before eventually being extracted from mines in South Africa, Russia and elsewhere. Companies like De Beers convinced the world that a diamond is forever, made the stones synonymous with engagement rings and encouraged people to spend at least three months’ salary on a rock when they wed.But in recent years, the natural diamond industry has been upended by laboratory-grown diamonds, which…
The mood at MilkenAs dealmakers descended on the Beverly Hilton hotel in Los Angeles this week for the annual Milken Institute Global Conference, they were laser-focused on one type of deal: trade deals.The threat of an intensifying trade war cast a shadow over the event, Lauren Hirsch reports.Many business giants in attendance — including Bill Ackman, Jensen Huang and Ken Griffin — started the year imagining how good things could be under President Trump. But talk at this week’s event, behind the scenes at least, was about how bad it could get. Speculation ranged from cautious optimism that the U.S.…