Author: News Room

Chaos surrounded us. Informal porters rolling luggage carts zigzagged between cars. Commuters spilled from the bus terminal onto the sidewalk, where they sat on suitcases and duffel bags. Minibus taxis zoomed through the congestion, pedestrians be damned.Our car crawled past a barbed-wire fence and reached a sliding gate, where all that separated my wife and me from the empty lot on the other side was a security guard. “Blue Train,” I said, and the guard waved us through.We pulled up to a blue carpet next to Cape Town’s central train station, where two butlers in blue vests and white gloves…

A Signal leakBy far the biggest story of the day is The Atlantic’s stunning revelation that Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, discussed sensitive Yemen bombing plans with other senior Trump administration officials on a messaging app — in a group text that mistakenly included that publication’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg.The incident has raised serious questions about whether the group chat violated laws including the Espionage Act and endangered troops. But it’s also reminiscent of how Wall Street firms got into hot water for similar reasons. They had to pay more than $2 billion for doing the kind of off-channel…

There are few customers Conor Proft appreciates more than people who eat alone.A bartender at the Italian restaurant Fausto, in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, he said the solo diners he serves tend to be more engaged and willing to chat. They are self-aware and more attuned to the restaurant’s rhythms.But does Mr. Proft dine alone? Rarely.“I love the romantic ideal of going into a restaurant and sitting at the bar and striking up a conversation with a bartender,” he said. “But oftentimes in practice, I am just consumed with anxiety” about standing out.This is part of the paradox of solo dining.…

When Starbucks announced last month that it was laying off more than 1,000 corporate employees, it highlighted a disturbing trend for white-collar workers: Over the past few years, they have seen a steeper rise in unemployment than other groups, and slower wage growth.It also added fuel to a debate that has preoccupied economists for much of that time: Are the recent job losses merely a temporary development? Or do they signal something more ominous and irreversible?After sitting below 4 percent for more than two years, the overall unemployment rate has topped that threshold since May.Economists say that the job market…

PBS is practicing answers with lawyers. NPR executives are preparing to monitor the fallout. Members of Congress are promoting the star witnesses — the leaders of the two public media networks — as if they were combatants in a prizefight.They’re all getting ready for a hearing on Wednesday — ominously titled “Anti-American Airwaves” — organized by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia Republican who leads a House subcommittee tied to Elon Musk’s efforts to cut federal spending.Ms. Greene said in an interview that she planned to call on the two top witnesses, Paula Kerger, the chief executive of PBS, and…

Increased federal spending in recent years has helped to improve U.S. ports, roads, parks, public transit and levees, according to a report released on Tuesday by the American Society of Civil Engineers.But that progress could stagnate if those investments, some of which were put on hold after President Trump took office in January, aren’t sustained.Overall, the group gave the nation’s infrastructure a C grade, a mediocre rating but the best the country has received since the group’s first report card in 1998. Most infrastructure, including aviation, waterways and schools, earned a C or D grade; ports and rail did better.…

China has released five employees of an American corporate investigations firm, the Mintz Group, two years after they were detained as part of a crackdown by Beijing on foreign business consultancies.“We understand that the Mintz Group Beijing employees who were detained, all Chinese nationals, have now all been released,” the firm said in a statement on Tuesday.“We are grateful to the Chinese authorities that our former colleagues can now be home with their families,” the company said.The employees’ release comes as China is trying to revive overseas investment to help revive its sluggish economy. Dozens of foreign executives, including Tim…

Han Jong-Hee, the co-chief executive of Samsung Electronics and a nearly four-decade veteran of the South Korean consumer technology giant, died on Tuesday.Mr. Han, who was 63, suffered a sudden heart attack, according to a company spokeswoman.Mr. Han had shared chief executive duties with the head of Samsung’s semiconductor business since 2022, and was also a member of the board. He had run Samsung’s consumer electronics business since 2021 and a year later added the digital appliance operation to his brief. Previously he oversaw the group that makes the visual displays for Samsung’s wide variety of electronic devices.Mr. Han joined…

For most of the last three years, the most clever, artful and progressive act in K-pop has been NewJeans, a five-member girl group — Danielle, Haerin, Hanni, Hyein and Minji — with an almost preternatural musical and aesthetic sophistication. With one elegantly rendered chart-topping single after another, the artists, who range in age from 16 to 20, seemed invincible.Which is why the group’s announcement, last November, that it wished to terminate its contract with its label and management agency, Ador — a sublabel of the K-pop conglomerate Hybe — was such a watershed moment. NewJeans said that its differences with…

When the Wall Street veteran Frank Bisignano goes before Congress on Tuesday as President Trump’s pick to lead the Social Security Administration, he will confront questions about how he would run an agency suddenly in the grips of upheaval.In recent weeks, the billionaire Elon Musk has zeroed in on the agency, which is charged with the staid but critical work of providing retirement, survivor and disability payments to 73 million Americans each month.Mr. Musk has claimed that vast numbers of Americans are fraudulently drawing benefits from the agency, an assertion experts say is demonstrably false. Over the objections of longtime…