Author: News Room

At a sprawling Whole Foods Market in Philadelphia, a battle is brewing. The roughly 300 workers are set to vote on Monday on whether to form the first union in Amazon’s grocery business.Several store employees said they hoped a union could negotiate higher starting wages, above the current rate of $16 an hour. They’re also aiming to secure health insurance for part-time workers and protections against at-will firing.There is a broader goal, too: to inspire a wave of organizing across the grocery chain, adding to union drives among warehouse workers and delivery drivers that Amazon is already combating.“If all the…

In 1994, Bob Kulhan was in his early 20s and on the path to becoming a marketing executive at a top ad agency. The financial stability of his blossoming career comforted his parents.That year, he also began taking improvisational comedy classes at Second City, a renowned comedy institution based in Chicago. There, Mr. Kulhan learned from stars like Tina Fey, Amy Poehler and Del Close.“Improv is what I am supposed to be doing with my life,” he said he realized after taking classes for a year. At 24, he quit his comfortable job to pursue a career in improv comedy.To…

A rare display of public anger is unfolding in China over the quality of domestically produced drugs.A prominent Shanghai surgeon pointed to anesthetics that do not put patients to sleep. A respected Beijing cardiologist questioned blood pressure medication that failed to regulate. A former editor at a leading online health platform went as far as to accuse domestic drugmakers of fraud.The concerns spilled out into public discussions this week when some top doctors and hospital leaders called on the government to change how it buys drugs for its public hospitals.The outburst of scrutiny, unusual in a country where the authorities…

The initial plan for retooling the federal government under President Trump started with three loyal billionaires: the banker Howard Lutnick, the tech leader Elon Musk and the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy.Now, it’s down to one.Mr. Lutnick emerged as Mr. Trump’s pick to run the Commerce Department. Mr. Ramaswamy decided to step aside from the project just before Mr. Trump assumed office on Monday.As a result, Mr. Musk, the world’s richest man, now has full command of the federal cost-cutting effort, which Mr. Trump has hailed as “potentially, ‘The Manhattan Project’ of our time.” How exactly Mr. Musk wields his consolidated power…

President Trump mused on Friday about shutting down the Federal Emergency Management Agency, saying that states could do a better job at responding to disasters.“When you have a problem like this, I think you want to go, whether it’s a Democrat or Republican governor, you want to use your state to fix it,” Mr. Trump said in Asheville, N.C., which was devastated by the remnants of Hurricane Helene last year.“I think we’re going to recommend that FEMA go away and we pay directly — we pay a percentage to the state,” Mr. Trump added. “The state should fix it.”Mr. Trump…

Reports that Fitbit’s Ionic smartwatch was overheating began in 2018 and continued into 2020. But according to U.S. officials, the company did not quickly report, as the law requires, that the battery inside the watch was creating an unreasonable risk of serious injury or death to consumers.On Thursday, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission announced that Fitbit had agreed to pay a $12.25 million civil penalty over its delay in reporting that the lithium-ion battery in the watch can overheat, creating a burn hazard.The commission noted that in early 2020, Fitbit had issued a firmware update to reduce the potential…

High interest rates kept U.S. home sales in a deep freeze for much of last year. It could be a while before the market experiences much of a thaw.Americans bought just over four million previously owned homes last year, the National Association of Realtors said on Friday. That was the fewest since 1995 and far below the annual pace of roughly five million that was typical before the coronavirus pandemic.Sales picked up a bit toward the end of the year, rising 9.3 percent in December from a year earlier. That increase probably reflected the dip in mortgage rates in the…

If you’re flying Spirit Airlines, wearing a crop top that reveals your torso or having certain tattoos could now be enough to get you kicked off a flight.The airline recently updated its policies to explicitly outline unacceptable passenger attire and appearance, going beyond the vague policies held by most other airlines . In its contract of carriage, which is a legal document outlining airline and passenger responsibilities, Spirit says “a guest shall not be permitted to board the aircraft or may be required to leave an aircraft” if the passenger is “inadequately clothed” or “whose clothing or article, including body…

“The chief business of the American people is business.” That declaration by Calvin Coolidge has been shortened and simplified since that Republican president uttered it before an assembly of newspaper editors a century ago.But the notion that the business of America is business was on conspicuous display at President Trump’s inauguration. It may be the chief reason for heightened optimism about the stock and bond markets.Plenty of worried readers have been writing in — asking how, in broad strokes, they ought to deploy their money during the second Trump presidency. It is both a pressing problem and an eternal quandary,…

As President Trump embarked on a sweeping crackdown on immigration upon his return to office this week, he left unresolved a rift that surfaced last month among some of his most influential supporters about the role of skilled foreign workers in the U.S. labor market.The split over the H-1B visa program, which allows skilled workers like software engineers to work in the United States, has pitted hard-line immigration opponents against some of Mr. Trump’s most prominent backers in the tech industry, who say they rely on the program because they can’t find enough qualified American workers.It’s unclear where Mr. Trump…