Author: News Room

Mark Zuckerberg’s ambitions as a Washington power player have led him to another corner of the capital’s hobnobbing scene: the Business Roundtable.In September, the Meta chief executive quietly joined the organization that lobbies on behalf of large U.S. companies after reaching out about doing so months earlier, Andy Stone, a Meta spokesman, told The New York Times.Mr. Zuckerberg, who once avoided weighing in on politics, has embraced President Trump and become a more visible presence in Washington. The night before Mr. Trump’s inauguration, where Mr. Zuckerberg had prime seating, he attended a black-tie party to celebrate the new administration at…

Jim Acosta, a CNN anchor who earned notice for grilling Trump administration officials in the White House Briefing Room, said Tuesday that he was leaving the network after nearly 20 years.Mr. Acosta announced the decision at the end of his 10 a.m. show, which will be his last for CNN. He is stepping down after clashing with the network over a decision to move his show to start at the midnight hour, a cable news backwater, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions. The network is moving Wolf Blitzer, a well-known CNN anchor, into his time slot, along…

For years, Dubrovnik, Croatia, has been a poster child for overtourism, with summer visitors vastly outnumbering the local population and the municipal government repeatedly introducing measures to diminish the size and impact of a flood of tourists that turns the historic center into a crowded parking lot of selfie-snappers.But you would never know about the negative effects of so many visitors from the Croatian Ministry of Tourism’s recent triumphant announcement noting that arrivals to the city had increased 9 percent in 2024, compared to 2023. “By all parameters we achieved another record year,” the tourism minister, Tonci Glavina, was quoted…

Lots of questions are still swirling this morning about the implications of DeepSeek, the Chinese start-up whose A.I. tools drove yesterday’s stock market plunge. Is it really as good as the closed-source frontier models made by OpenAI and Google? Did DeepSeek really use fewer chips? Did it piggyback off the work of U.S. players? And if it’s as good as some have suggested, how will its rise scramble the software, hardware and energy sectors? We break down what we know — and still don’t know — in our report below.Plus, DealBook’s Lauren Hirsch has a scoop on Mark Zuckerberg’s continuing…

Coca-Cola’s bottler in Europe said on Monday that it had recalled some drinks sold in Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands after discovering high levels of a chemical called chlorate during routine testing at a bottling facility.The recalled products included Coca-Cola, Sprite, Fanta, Fuze Tea, Minute Maid, Nalu, Royal Bliss and Tropico in cans and glass bottles, according to a statement from Coca-Cola Europacific Partners. Exposure to chlorate, a byproduct of using chlorine dioxide as a disinfectant and to control the odor and taste of water, can cause kidney problems and affect thyroid function, according to the Luxembourg Veterinary and Food…

General Motors executives are closely tracking President Trump’s plans to impose tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico, but the company is not yet making any major changes to its strategy in North America in response to the threatened tariffs.The automaker has pulled together an “extensive playbook” of possible options but won’t put them in place “until the world changes dramatically, and we see a permanent level of tariffs going forward,” the company’s chief financial officer, Paul Jacobson, told reporters in a conference call on Monday evening.“I won’t go into the details exactly but we’ve been preparing for that and…

At the Federal Reserve’s final gathering of 2024, Chair Jerome H. Powell announced that the U.S. central bank was embarking on a “new phase” in how it would set interest rates.The Fed planned to “move cautiously” with cuts going forward, Mr. Powell told reporters at the time, reflecting officials’ thinking that they could afford to be patient with scant signs of an impending recession and lingering inflationary pressures. On Wednesday, the Fed is set to put that approach into action, pressing pause on further reductions for the first time since they began lowering borrowing costs in September.The question now looming…

A sell-off in the biggest technology companies in the United States rippled into Asia on Tuesday, with stock markets in Japan falling as U.S. markets appeared to stabilize.Japan’s tech-heavy Nikkei 225 fell 1.4 percent with Softbank, the Japanese investment firm with major holdings in the technology sector, falling about 5 percent. Arm Holdings, the U.S. listed chip design company that is 88 percent owned by Softbank, dropped more than 10 percent on Monday.Many financial markets in Asia, including those in China and Taiwan, were closed on Tuesday for Lunar New Year. Markets in mainland China are set to remain closed…

The Trump administration declared on Friday that the Gulf of Mexico had been renamed the Gulf of America, but popular mapping services from Google and Apple have continued showing the old name.On Monday, Google said it would update its maps to display Gulf of America as soon as the U.S. government updated its official maps.“We have a longstanding practice of applying name changes when they have been updated in official government sources,” the company said in a post on X.President Trump signed an executive order on Jan. 20, his first day in office, to rename the gulf, in addition to…

Workers at a Whole Foods Market in Philadelphia voted on Monday to become the first unionized store in Amazon’s grocery chain, opening a new front in the e-commerce giant’s efforts to fend off labor organizing in multiple segments of its business.Employees at the sprawling Whole Foods store, in the city’s Spring Garden neighborhood, voted 130-100 in favor of organizing with the United Food and Commercial Workers union, the National Labor Relations Board said.Store employees said they hoped a union could help negotiate higher wages, above the current starting rate of $16 an hour, and better benefits. Some longtime employees, who…