Author: News Room

For just over two years, technology leaders at the forefront of developing artificial intelligence had made an unusual request of lawmakers. They wanted Washington to regulate them.The tech executives warned lawmakers that generative A.I., which can produce text and images that mimic human creations, had the potential to disrupt national security and elections, and could eventually eliminate millions of jobs.A.I. could go “quite wrong,” Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, testified in Congress in May 2023. “We want to work with the government to prevent that from happening.”But since President Trump’s election, tech leaders and their companies have changed…

In her first briefing as White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt said she was “committed to telling the truth from this podium every single day.” Moments later she announced that the new administration had blocked a $50 million contract for condoms in Gaza.“That is a preposterous waste of taxpayer money,” she said.It was also a preposterous claim, improbable on its face and quickly debunked. There were millions in federal grants awarded to prevent sexually transmitted diseases in Gaza, but in the province in Mozambique, not the Palestinian territory.The condoms claim went viral anyway, seeping into the political discourse that President…

One of President Trump’s former campaign managers, Chris LaCivita, on Monday filed a defamation lawsuit against The Daily Beast over its reporting on how much he was paid by the campaign.The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, accuses The Daily Beast of creating “the false impression that Mr. LaCivita was personally profiting excessively from his work on the campaign and that he was prioritizing personal gain over the campaign’s success.”It centers on an article published Oct. 15, 2024, with the headline: “Trump In Cash Crisis-As Campaign Chief’s $22m Pay Revealed.” The article was…

Hyundai Motor, a South Korean conglomerate known for its automobiles, will invest $21 billion to expand manufacturing in the United States in what President Trump said was proof that his tariff policies were creating jobs.The company, which also produces steel, said the investment through 2028 would include $6 billion for a steel factory in Louisiana that would employ 1,300 people and for other projects to supply Hyundai factories with parts and materials.The company will also spend $9 billion to expand production of Hyundai, Kia and Genesis vehicles in the United States. The rest of the money will be used for…

When the biotech company Humacyte designed a study to see if its lab-grown blood vessel worked, it decided to measure whether blood was flowing freely through the high-tech tube 30 days after it was implanted in a person.As those days passed, some of the 54 patients in the study ran into trouble. Doctors lost track of one. Four died. Four more had a limb amputated, including one who developed a clot and infection in the artificial vessel, Food and Drug Administration records show.Humacyte, which is traded on the Nasdaq, counted all those patients as proof of success in talks with…

President Trump said Monday that he would crack down on countries that bought Venezuela’s oil by imposing tariffs on goods those nations sent into the United States, claiming that Venezuela has “purposefully and deceitfully” sent criminals and murderers into America.In a post on Truth Social, the president said that any country that purchased oil or gas from Venezuela would be forced to pay a tariff of 25 percent on any exports they sent to the United States, starting April 2.This unconventional use of tariffs could further disrupt the global oil trade as buyers of Venezuelan oil and gas seek alternatives.…

Surprisingly, Mr. Ewing, who joined The Times in 2010 as a European economics reporter based in Frankfurt, doesn’t consider himself much of a car enthusiast.“I’m interested in the engineering,” he said. “I like to visit factories. But I’m not someone who gets all excited about horse power, or some new kind of car.”In a recent conversation, Mr. Ewing, who is now based in New York, discussed the challenges of reporting on a company as secretive as Tesla. These are edited excerpts.How has your beat changed, given Elon Musk’s role in the federal government?There has always been a strong policy aspect…

Ahead of President Trump’s next big trade move, his administration invited companies to weigh in on the economic barriers they faced abroad.The list of complaints was both sprawling and specific. In hundreds of letters submitted to the administration in recent weeks, producers of uranium, shrimp, T-shirts and steel highlighted the unfair trade treatment they faced, in hopes of bending the president’s trade agenda in their favor. The complaints varied from Brazil’s high tariffs on ethanol and pet food, to India’s high levies on almonds and pecans, to Japan’s longstanding barriers to American potatoes.Mr. Trump has promised to overhaul the global…

Before the election, Toyota Motor and other Japanese automakers thought a second Trump administration could be good for them.President Trump had campaigned on dismantling policies aimed at swiftly accelerating the U.S. auto industry’s shift away from fossil fuels and to electric vehicles — directives that Toyota and other leading manufacturers of gasoline and hybrid gasoline-electric cars had also long opposed.Toyota donated $1 million to Mr. Trump’s inauguration in January, and attendees at the company’s dealership meeting in Dallas that month said it was brimming with Trump cheer.But as Mr. Trump’s agenda has taken shape, much of that optimism has turned…

Within the Trump administration’s Defense Department, Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocketry is being trumpeted as the nifty new way the Pentagon could move military cargo rapidly around the globe.In the Commerce Department, SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet service will now be fully eligible for the federal government’s $42 billion rural broadband push, after being largely shut out during the Biden era.At NASA, after repeated nudges by Mr. Musk, the agency is being squeezed to turn its focus to Mars, allowing SpaceX to pursue federal contracts to deliver the first humans to the distant planet.And at the Federal Aviation Administration and the White…