Author: News Room

In its high-stakes trade talks with the United States, China has been trying to strike a balance in how it wields its market clout. It controls the world’s supply of rare earth metals and magnets. And it has withheld supplies of the materials — crucial ingredients in everything from cars to fighter jets — as leverage.At the same time, Beijing knows it must not overplay its hand by pushing Washington so hard that the United States feels compelled to make the long-term investments needed to break its dependence on China.This delicate dynamic was underlined in an apparent compromise the countries…

Secretary of State Marco Rubio is pushing to investigate whether Harvard University violated federal sanctions by collaborating on a health insurance conference in China that may have included officials blacklisted by the U.S. government, according to people familiar with the matter and documents reviewed by The New York Times.Mr. Rubio signed off on a recommendation to the Treasury Department last month to open an investigation, which experts and former Treasury officials said was an unusual attempt from a cabinet secretary to target a domestic entity for sanctions enforcement.Whether the agency within the Treasury that handles sanctions, the Office of Foreign…

When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Germany realized that its dependency on natural gas piped from Russia had endangered its energy security. It had no ports to bring in alternative energy sources needed to keep its factories running and homes warm. Three years on, it now has four.The most recent began operating in late May when a tanker called the Energy Endurance pulled in close to shore at the harbor town Wilhelmshaven and began unloading its cargo: liquefied natural gas from the Gulf Coast of the United States.Watching from a dike, where lambs and their mothers grazed on spring grass,…

Elon Musk said in a social media post early Wednesday that he regretted some of his posts and comments about President Trump last week, which had led the president to disparage Mr. Musk.Mr. Musk said on his X platform that some of his posts about Mr. Trump “went too far.”Mr. Musk, the world’s richest person, was once among the president’s closest advisers. But he and Mr. Trump had a dramatic and public falling out after the Tesla chief executive left his role in the administration.Both men traded barbs on social media, and Mr. Trump said last week that he had…

Who wants to lead the Department of Government Efficiency?With the departure of Elon Musk and his right-hand man Steve Davis from government, administration officials and members of the controversial cost-cutting effort have been in detailed discussions this week about who will functionally be in charge of it, according to four people familiar with the talks.Debate about who should take charge has spread through the White House, DOGE and Silicon Valley. In the first days after Mr. Musk’s departure, it centered on the billionaire Joe Gebbia, one of Mr. Musk’s close friends and a board member at his automaker, Tesla.Mr. Gebbia…

A federal appeals court agreed on Tuesday to allow President Trump to maintain many of his tariffs on China and other U.S. trading partners, extending a pause granted shortly after another panel of judges ruled in late May that the import taxes were illegal.The decision, from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, delivered an important but interim victory for the Trump administration, which had warned that any interruption to its steep duties could undercut the president in talks around the world.But the government still must convince the judges that the president appropriately used a set…

The United States and China have agreed to a “framework” that is intended to ease economic tension and extend a trade truce that the world’s two largest economies reached last month, officials from both countries said on Tuesday.After two days of marathon negotiations in London, top economic officials from the United States and China are now expected to present the new framework to their leaders, President Trump and President Xi Jinping, for final approval.The agreement is intended to solidify terms of a deal that the United States and China reached in Switzerland in May that unraveled in recent weeks. Howard…

Barbara Holdridge, who co-founded the first commercially successful spoken-word record label, one that began with the poet Dylan Thomas reciting his story “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” and that led to today’s multibillion-dollar audiobook industry, died on Monday at home in Baltimore, Md. She was 95.Her daughter, Eleanor Holdridge, confirmed the death.Ms. Holdridge, along with her best friend, Marianne Mantell, built the label, Caedmon Records, into a recording industry dynamo by releasing LPs of such notable authors and poets as W.H. Auden, T.S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein, Robert Frost, Eudora Welty, William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway reading their own…

ABC News is cutting ties with the correspondent Terry Moran after he wrote derisive comments on social media that attacked President Trump and Stephen Miller, the deputy White House chief of staff, referring to both men with the term “world-class hater.”The network said on Tuesday that it had decided not to renew Mr. Moran’s contract. He had worked at ABC News for 28 years.“We are at the end of our agreement with Terry Moran, and based on his recent post — which was a clear violation of ABC News policies — we have made the decision to not renew,” a…

Twenty-seven states and the District of Columbia have sued the genetic-testing company 23andMe to oppose the sale of DNA data from its customers without their direct consent.The suit, filed on Monday in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in the Eastern District of Missouri, argues that 23andMe needs to have permission from each and every customer before their data is potentially sold. The company had entered an agreement to sell itself and its assets in bankruptcy court.The information for sale “comprises an unprecedented compilation of highly sensitive and immutable personal data of consumers,” according to the lawsuit.“This isn’t just data — it’s your…