Author: News Room

British Airways will get 32 new Boeing planes, in a deal worth nearly $13 billion, its parent company announced on Friday, a day after U.S. officials teased a big order was coming for America’s largest plane maker.IAG, which owns British Airways and other European airlines, said it had ordered the Boeing aircraft as well as 21 planes from Airbus, a French aerospace company, to be delivered between 2028 and 2033. Most of the planes were replacements for aging aircraft, but about a third were to expand the group’s fleet as it took a bet on long-haul flights.The announcement came after…

On a frigid day in early January, as she worked in her office in the Boston suburb of Billerica, Mass., Siyu Huang received a two-word text message.“Spinning wheels,” it said. Attached was a short video clip showing a car on rollers in an indoor testing center.To the untrained eye there was nothing remarkable in the video. The car could have been getting its emissions tested at a Connecticut auto repair shop (except it had no tailpipe). But to Ms. Huang, the chief executive of Factorial Energy, the video was a milestone in a quest that had already occupied a decade…

Randy Carr watched the news on his laptop the way you look at a doctor about to administer a shot — nervously and braced for pain. It was April 2, and President Trump was in the Rose Garden about to unveil new tariffs.An upbeat, slightly jacked 52-year-old, Mr. Carr is the chief executive of World Emblem, a privately held company based in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., that produces about 150 million embroidered patches a year, most of which end up on shirts and hats. He radiates so much energy that even sitting down he appears to be set on vibrate. He’s…

An air traffic control facility that guides planes at Newark Liberty International Airport suffered a brief radar outage on Friday morning, the latest technological disruption at one of the nation’s busiest airports.The Federal Aviation Administration said that the outage, which affected communications and radar displays at the facility in Philadelphia, occurred just before 4 a.m. and lasted about 90 seconds.An air traffic controller mentioned the outage to the pilot of FedEx flight 1989 around that time, according to a publicly available recording of air traffic control communications with pilots.“FedEx 1989, I’m going to hand you off here, our scopes just…

Robert A.G. Monks, a lawyer and businessman from a prominent Massachusetts family who unsuccessfully ran for the U.S. Senate three times but found a calling in his 40s as an influential defender of shareholder rights, died on April 29 at his home in Cape Elizabeth, Maine. He was 91.The cause was pancreatic cancer, which was diagnosed about a week before his death, his son, Bobby, said.By age 40, Mr. Monks had worked his way up to partner at the Goodwin Procter law firm in Boston, amassed a fortune running a regional oil and coal firm and other businesses, and made…

Gerhard Randers-Pehrson, an 81-year-old resident of Ossining, N.Y., believes the $10,000 cap should go up — but not too much. While Mr. Randers-Pehrson, a retired research scientist, said he paid $16,000 in state and local taxes last year, he does not expect to personally benefit from a higher cap. He would take the standard deduction instead of itemizing. But the issue still bothers him.“I don’t think we should punish areas that try to do right by the municipal services they provide,” he said. His congressman, Representative Mike Lawler, a Republican and one of the holdouts on the issue, has proposed…

President Trump has ordered federal agencies to abandon the use of a longstanding legal tool used to root out discrimination against minorities, a move that could defang the nation’s bedrock civil rights law.In an expansive executive order, Mr. Trump directed the federal government to curtail the use of “disparate-impact liability,” a core tenet used for decades to enforce the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by determining whether policies disproportionately disadvantage certain groups.The little-noticed order, issued last month with a spate of others targeting equity policies, was the latest effort in Mr. Trump’s aggressive push to purge the consideration of diversity,…

At least 44 of the government contracts canceled on the orders of Elon Musk’s cost-cutting initiative have been resurrected by federal agencies, wiping out more than $220 million of his group’s purported savings, according to a New York Times analysis of federal spending data.But Mr. Musk’s group continues to list 43 of those contracts as “terminations” on its website, which it calls the “Wall of Receipts.” The group even added some of them days or weeks after they had been resurrected. The result was another in a series of data errors on the website that made the group seem more…

President Trump on Friday suggested that he was open to sharply reducing the tariffs that the United States has imposed on China, as American and Chinese negotiators prepare to meet in Switzerland this weekend for high-stakes trade talks.Trade tensions between the U.S. and China have roiled international markets and the global economy. The negotiations on Saturday and Sunday are intended to de-escalate the situation and set the stage for a broader trade pact between the two economic superpowers.In a post on social media, Mr. Trump said that an 80 percent tariff on China “seems right,” adding that it would be…

Japanese tech giant Panasonic is planning to pare troubled business lines and its work force by thousands as it aims to reorient itself for a technological era no longer dominated by its traditional electronics.In a statement on Friday, Panasonic said that it would cut about 10,000 jobs globally, or about 4 percent of employees, primarily within the fiscal year that started in April. The cuts include 5,000 jobs in Japan and 5,000 overseas. As part of its effort to bolster profitability, the company said it would “promote the termination of loss-making businesses with no prospect of improving profit.”Founded in Osaka…