Author: News Room

The Jacksonville Jaguars, after 72 hours of intrigue, followed this template and hired Tampa Bay’s offensive coordinator, Liam Coen, 39, for more than $11 million a season. At first, Coen turned down the job and accepted a raise from Tampa that would have made him the highest-paid coordinator in the league at more than $4 million annually. When Jacksonville fired its general manager, however, Coen changed his mind.“As you continue to do more research and gain more information as you go, it started to become more clear with every hour that this was an opportunity that you just can’t pass…

Just in: Lawyers for Elon Musk said he’d withdraw his $97.4 billion bid for control of OpenAI if the company halted its efforts to become a for-profit enterprise. More below.Separately: You might recall that several years ago I wrote a series of columns, following a raft of mass shootings, that inspired the creation of a “merchant category code” for gun retailers so credit card companies could better identify suspicious activity the way they already did to help prevent money laundering and sex trafficking.Well, this week Representative Riley Moore, Republican of West Virginia, introduced a bill to make it illegal for…

Dear Tripped Up,In June 2023, we stayed six nights in an Airbnb apartment in Paris, and it was trouble from the start. The electricity was faulty, forcing my children to use a flashlight to climb a steep stairwell, and the Wi-Fi didn’t work, requiring us to spend about $200 on international data. For workers to come fix the Wi-Fi, we were instructed to leave the key in a lockbox. (The lights were never fixed.) Two days later, we returned in the afternoon to find our apartment had been robbed, with a laptop, clothing and other items missing. It’s not clear…

The Trump administration is rapidly delivering wins to American companies by rolling back regulations, pausing investigations and retreating from lawsuits accusing employers of discrimination.A combination of firings, stop-work orders and litigation pauses has hobbled regulators like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, and the Securities and Exchange Commission.The moves have led the S.E.C. to pull back on its attempt to police the cryptocurrency boom and upended efforts at other agencies to protect worker rights.The speed and scale of the deregulatory moves by President Trump reflect his ambitious agenda to downsize government.But…

In many ways, the issues at Reagan National’s control tower are emblematic of the fraying safety net that protects air travel throughout the United States. A Times investigation in 2023 found that close calls involving passenger planes happened, on average, multiple times each week across the country. The near misses were often the result of human error by pilots or air traffic controllers.At Reagan National, the busy helicopter corridor around the airport became such a concern that safety groups identified conflict points, where the possibility for a collision was highest, according to three people familiar with the meetings.One was over…

The British economy eked out growth at the end of last year, data published on Thursday showed, slightly easing the pressure on the government as it tries to quicken the pace of economic growth.Gross domestic product increased 0.1 percent in the last three months of 2024, following zero growth in the previous quarter.Most economists, including at the Bank of England, had expected another quarter of stagnation at the end of the year, but the economy grew faster than expected in December because of a jump in activity in the service sector.The Labour Party, which came to power last summer, has…

Not so long ago, Taiwan basked in seemingly boundless, bipartisan support in Washington, where the island has long been regarded as a valiant democratic partner against China.Now, a few weeks into President Donald J. Trump’s second term, Taiwan is adjusting to a shift in its relationship with the United States, its primary backer — one that does not focus on shared democratic ideals, and that is more uncertain and transactional. Mr. Trump has accused Taiwan of spending far too little on its own security and of gaining an unfair dominance in making semiconductors.Taiwanese officials and businesspeople have been trying to…

A $50 billion merger between Honda Motor and Nissan Motor, which would have established one of the world’s largest auto groups, has been called off.In December, Japan’s second- and third-largest automakers said they were exploring plans to combine their operations with the goal of sharing costs and jointly developing next-generation vehicles. Both companies said in a statement on Thursday that they were walking away from talks.The swift reversal underscores a growing recognition in the industry that sprawling auto alliances, often relied upon in the past to build scale and increase market share, may not be the answer for automakers scrambling…

Last month, U.S. financial markets tumbled after a Chinese start-up called DeepSeek said it had built one of the world’s most powerful artificial intelligence systems using far fewer computer chips than many experts thought possible.A.I. companies typically train their chatbots using supercomputers packed with 16,000 specialized chips or more. But DeepSeek said it needed only about 2,000.As DeepSeek engineers detailed in a research paper published just after Christmas, the start-up used several technological tricks to significantly reduce the cost of building its system. Its engineers needed only about $6 million in raw computing power, roughly one-tenth of what Meta spent…

Federal electricity regulators on Tuesday approved a proposal from the nation’s largest electric grid operator that could effectively give new natural gas power plants priority in connecting to the grid over renewable energy sources like solar and wind.The decision, by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, comes as the United States faces the prospect of the largest increase in electricity demand in recent decades. Technology companies are building hundreds of energy-hungry data centers across the country to power artificial intelligence models and other services.The ruling represents a win for companies involved in extracting natural gas and burning it to generate power…