Author: News Room

An important segment of India’s business community woke up Wednesday to a fright: President Trump had again brandished the threat of tariffs on pharmaceutical imports.“We’re going to be announcing very shortly a major tariff on pharmaceuticals,” he told guests at a dinner held by the National Republican Congressional Committee.India has spent most of a week trying to find reasons for hope after the shock of being hit with a 27 percent blanket rate. One of the best was the fact that the global pharmaceutical industry was excluded from the first round of tariffs.Last year India exported almost $13 billion worth…

Market turmoil extended into Wednesday’s trading session in Asia, as stocks across the region faced renewed downward pressure amid the impending imposition of significantly higher taxes on imports to the United States.Benchmark indexes in Japan and Hong Kong opened down more than 3 percent on Wednesday morning, following a day on Wall Street when stocks whipsawed. The S&P 500 ended near a bear market, which is a 20 percent drop from a recent peak — a symbolic, and relatively rare and worrisome threshold for investors.Stocks slumped across Asia in early trading on Wednesday. The declines were less pronounced in mainland…

Wall Street billionaires are not used to being on the outside looking in. But that is where they find themselves after President Trump ignored their appeals to call off his tariff plans which they fear could endanger the economy.With the backdrop of rapidly mounting stock market losses, corporate titans have worked every angle — phone calls, social media and even a typically staid shareholder letter — to try to change Mr. Trump’s mind.The day after the president announced his most sweeping round of tariffs last week, chief executives from major banks, including Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, had a private…

The Supreme Court on Tuesday blocked a ruling from a federal judge in California that had ordered the Trump administration to rehire thousands of fired federal workers who had been on probationary status.The court’s brief order said the nonprofit groups that had sued to challenge the dismissals had not suffered the sort of injury that gave them standing to sue.The practical consequences of the ruling may be limited, as another trial judge’s ruling requiring the reinstatement of many of the same workers remains in place.Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented, but she gave no reasons. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said the court…

President Trump’s 25 percent tariffs on imported vehicles, which went into effect last week, are already sending tremors through the auto industry, prompting companies to stop shipping cars to the United States, shut down factories in Canada and Mexico and lay off workers in Michigan and other states.Jaguar Land Rover, based in Britain, said it would temporarily stop exporting its luxury cars to the United States. Stellantis idled factories in Canada and Mexico that make Chrysler and Jeep vehicles and laid off 900 U.S. workers who supplied those factories with engines and other parts.Audi, the luxury division of Volkswagen, also…

The Trump administration formally barred federal workers from listing their preferred pronouns in email signatures, calling it a symptom of a misguided “gender ideology.”Some White House officials are taking a similar approach with the journalists who cover them.On at least three recent occasions, senior Trump press aides have refused to engage with reporters’ questions because the journalists listed identifying pronouns in their email signatures.“As a matter of policy, we do not respond to reporters with pronouns in their bios,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, wrote to a New York Times reporter who had inquired about the potential closing…

A big law firm that has come under attack by the Trump administration filed court papers on Tuesday seeking to permanently block an executive order that threatens its businesses and ability to represent clients in matters involving the federal government.The firm, Jenner & Block, filed the papers in federal court in Washington a little over a week after a judge approved a temporary restraining order against most of the provisions in the executive order.In its filing, Jenner & Block said that the executive order was “a plain violation of the First Amendment” and that it punished the firm for representing…

Robert W. McChesney, an influential left-leaning media critic who argued that corporate ownership was bad for American journalism and that Silicon Valley billionaires who dominated online information were a threat to democracy, died on March 25, at his home in Madison, Wis. He was 72.The cause was glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer, his wife, Inger Stole, said.Professor McChesney was grounded both in academia — he had a Ph.D. in communications and taught at universities — and in ink-on-paper journalism: He was the founding publisher of The Rocket, a Seattle music magazine that reviewed Nirvana’s first single.His primary thesis, expressed in…

A senior Panamanian official on Monday said he had uncovered evidence of misconduct by a Hong Kong company, a finding that could delay or even scuttle a ports deal that has put China at loggerheads with the United States.Last month the Hong Kong conglomerate CK Hutchison agreed to sell a business that encompasses 43 ports, including two in Panama, to a group led by BlackRock, a large American asset manager, for $19 billion. President Trump has said China has too much control over Panama, and the deal was seen by some policy analysts as mitigating to some of his concerns.…

President Trump has vowed that he wouldn’t cut Social Security benefits, but his administration’s actions, led by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, have upended the agency, leaving many beneficiaries concerned that the popular program and their payments may be imperiled.Several players from the private equity world are now embedded inside the Social Security Administration, which is embarking on deep jobs cuts and other policy changes. At the same time, top Trump administration officials continue to perpetuate falsehoods about widespread fraud, even after the allegations are quickly debunked.These rapid-fire changes have unfolded ahead of the arrival of the incoming commissioner,…