Author: News Room

Chevron said Friday that it had completed an expansion at its Tengiz oil field in Kazakhstan intended to increase production this year to around one million barrels a day, approaching 1 percent of global supplies.Chevron, which recently moved its headquarters from near San Francisco to Houston, continues to plow money into oil production, shrugging off concerns that demand will weaken as consumers shift to electric vehicles and cleaner energy.“We know that the global demand for oil is going to continue to grow,” Clay Neff, president of Chevron international exploration and production, said in an interview.Tengiz, one of the world’s most…

Two years ago, OpenAI launched the chatbot craze with the release of ChatGPT. Now it hopes to spark interest in a new wave of A.I. technology.On Thursday, OpenAI unveiled a tool called Operator that can go out onto the internet and perform tasks autonomously, like shopping for groceries or booking a restaurant reservation.“It can navigate websites and take actions on websites, much like you and I do,” said OpenAI product and engineering lead Yash Kumar in an interview.Artificial intelligence researchers call this kind of technology an A.I. agent. While chatbots can answer questions, write poems and generate images, agents can…

President Trump on Thursday issued an executive order to support the growth of the cryptocurrency industry, calling for a new plan to regulate a business in which he has substantial personal investments.The executive order, which was light on details, said the Trump administration would create a working group on digital assets to come up with a comprehensive plan including “regulatory and legislative proposals.” The group would also consider establishing a national cryptocurrency stockpile, the order said — a government-controlled stash of digital coins that the industry has spent months lobbying the new administration to create.“The digital asset industry plays a…

Instagram and Facebook have recently blurred, blocked or removed posts from two abortion pill providers. Instagram also suspended the accounts of several abortion pill providers and hid the providers from appearing in search and recommendations.The actions ramped up in the last two weeks, and were especially noticeable in the last two days, abortion pill providers said. Content from their accounts — or in some cases, their entire accounts — were no longer visible on Instagram.Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, confirmed the account suspensions and the blurring of posts. The company restored some of the accounts and posts on Thursday,…

In a number of ways, Japan’s economy seems to have gone back in time.Inflation and wage growth are mostly back where they were in the early 1990s, just before the spiral of price deflation and economic stagnation that became known as “the lost decades.”That prompted the Bank of Japan on Friday to raise interest rates by a quarter point, to 0.5 percent, another step in its pivot away from the ultralow rates officials long used to try to jolt the economy back to life.Friday’s increase, which brought rates to their highest level since 2008, was the third in just under…

Charles Phan, a self-taught chef whose family fled Vietnam when he was a teenager and whose sleek restaurant helped change America’s perception of Asian food by replacing menus of inexpensive noodle dishes and spring rolls with ones that married the best local ingredients with the food he grew up on, died on Monday in San Francisco. He was 62.His death, in a hospital, where he was taken last week after experiencing cardiac arrest during a tennis game, was confirmed by Anh Duong, the publicist for his restaurant group.Mr. Phan became something of a food world star. He published two cookbooks,…

For about $1,000, you may leave an Apple store with a brand-new, hermetically sealed iPhone that’s been personalized for you by a verified Genius.Or, for hundreds or even thousands of dollars more, you can buy a used phone with a cracked screen and dirt-filled speakers, from someone on the internet.It all just depends on how much you love TikTok.When the video-sharing app stopped working in the United States on Saturday evening after the Supreme Court backed a law that effectively banned the app, some users deleted the app from their phones. The next day, the app started working again when…

The S&P 500 clambered back to a record high on Thursday, inching above a peak reached in early December, building on gains after President Trump reiterated his commitment to bring down oil prices — a major component of inflation.The S&P 500 rose just 0.5 percent on Thursday, but the gain added to a winning streak that began more than a week ago with data that showed inflation slowing in December by more than economists had expected. With Thursday’s rise the index is up 4 percent in the first three weeks of the year.The recent rally arrived after the market had…

The Justice Department has abruptly rescinded job offers made to dozens of recent law school graduates who were to be placed in entry-level positions in its antitrust, criminal, civil rights, immigration and national security divisions, and at the F.B.I., according to people familiar with the situation.The offers were made through the Attorney General’s Honors Program, which has functioned without controversy — or much notice — under presidents of both parties for decades. The program appears to be the latest target of Trump political appointees intent on reversing even the most workaday decisions made by their predecessors.The move was part of…

President Trump took an unexpected swipe on Thursday at the big banks that have cheered his return to office, as he raised longstanding Republican complaints that they are discriminated against by major lenders.The moment came almost as an aside, as Mr. Trump was participating virtually in a question-and-answer session with executives gathered at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.His questioner, Brian T. Moynihan, Bank of America’s chief executive, asked a rote, prepared question about the new administration’s plans for the economy.Mr. Trump capped off a nearly two-minute response by observing:“By the way, speaking of you — and you’ve done…