Author: News Room

Late last month, two days before Christmas, the Rev. Dr. Katrina D. Foster, pastor of St. John’s Lutheran Church in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Greenpoint, was showing off her church’s recent renovations. The neo-Gothic church was built in 1891, and the original blue, vaulted ceiling; wooden pews; stained-glass windows; and a Jardine & Son pipe organ all looked relatively new.“On Dec. 7 we had a huge rededication service,” said Pastor Foster, 56, who walked around the church with quick, sprightly steps and could not stop beaming. “It was the same day as Notre-Dame had theirs.”Since 1994, when Pastor Foster was…

For 20 years, Marina Khidekel worked at magazines like Cosmopolitan and Women’s Health, and as chief content officer for Thrive Global. While her work centered on helping readers manage their mental wellness, she faced her own struggles, too. “I had a lot of nighttime anxiety,” she said. “So I tried a weighted blanket, but it was too smothering for me.”Seeking something more cuddly, Ms. Khidekel designed a weighted stuffed animal. In 2022, she left her journalism career and founded Hugimals World.Ms. Khidekel, who is in her mid-40s, worked with occupational therapists and psychologists to design stuffed animals with sweet expressions…

Ann Telnaes, a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist for The Washington Post, said on Friday evening that she was resigning after the newspaper’s opinions section rejected a cartoon depicting The Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, genuflecting toward a statue of President-elect Donald J. Trump.In a brief statement posted to Substack, Ms. Telnaes — who has worked at The Post since 2008 — called the newspaper’s decision to kill her cartoon a “game changer” that was “dangerous for a free press.”“In all that time I’ve never had a cartoon killed because of who or what I chose to aim my pen at,” she wrote.…

As signs emerged that President Biden was gearing up to stop the Japanese steel maker Nippon Steel from acquiring Pittsburgh-based U.S. Steel, top Japanese officials repeatedly warned that quashing the merger would hinder economic ties between the allies.Japan’s biggest business lobby, Keidanren, said in September that America’s investability would be tarnished if Nippon Steel’s $15 billion bid was blocked. Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba of Japan reached out to Mr. Biden asking him to approve the deal during what he called a critical juncture.In the United States, during a heated presidential campaign, both Mr. Biden and his opponent, Donald J. Trump,…

The two sides in the momentous clash at the Supreme Court over a measure that could shut down TikTok made their closing written arguments on Friday, sharply disputing China’s influence over the site and the role the First Amendment should play in evaluating the law.Their briefs, filed on an exceptionally abbreviated schedule set last month by the justices, were part of a high-stakes showdown over the government’s insistence that ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, sell the app’s operations in the United States or shut it down. The Supreme Court, in an effort to resolve the case before the law’s Jan. 19…

The end of a troubled takeover bidPresident Biden is set to officially block Nippon Steel’s $14 billion takeover of U.S. Steel as soon as Friday, most likely putting an end to an industrial megadeal that ran up against widespread political opposition.But the decision could set off a cascade of consequences, including whether it would dissuade foreign investment in key industries, even from crucial U.S. allies like Japan. There’s one near-certainty: Expect a lot of litigation.The deal’s demise seemed increasingly inevitable. In March, Biden said it was “vital” that U.S. Steel remained American-owned. The United Steelworkers’ union opposed the transaction from…

The Treasury Department imposed sanctions on a Beijing-based cybersecurity company on Friday, blaming it for helping Chinese hackers infiltrate U.S. communications systems and conduct surveillance across four continents.In an announcement, the department said the company, Integrity Technology Group, had supported a Chinese state-sponsored hacking group known as Flax Typhoon in a campaign to break into foreign networks between the summer of 2022 and 2023, saying it found the group had “routinely sent and received information from Integrity Tech infrastructure.”The action came after the Treasury Department revealed in a letter to lawmakers this week that a Chinese intelligence agency had breached…

The Transportation Department announced on Friday a $2 million penalty against JetBlue Airways for operating several flights on the East Coast that chronically arrived late in 2022 and 2023. Half of the money collected will go to the impacted passengers.The penalty is the first time that the D.O.T. has fined an airline for chronic delays, which the federal agency defines as flights that are flown at least 10 times a month that arrive more than a half-hour late more than 50 percent of the time.“Illegal chronic flight delays make flying unreliable for travelers. Today’s action puts the entire airline industry…

To members of his synagogue, the voice that played over the speakers of Congregation Emanu El in Houston sounded just like Rabbi Josh Fixler’s.In the same steady rhythm his congregation had grown used to, the voice delivered a sermon about what it meant to be a neighbor in the age of artificial intelligence. Then, Rabbi Fixler took to the bimah himself.“The audio you heard a moment ago may have sounded like my words,” he said. “But they weren’t.”The recording was created by what Rabbi Fixler called “Rabbi Bot,” an A.I. chatbot trained on his old sermons. The chatbot, created with…

General Motors and Ford Motor each reported strong increases in vehicle sales in the United States in the final three months of 2024 amid rising expectations for continued growth in the new year.G.M. said its fourth-quarter sales rose 21 percent from the period a year earlier, to more than 755,000 cars and light trucks. The company’s sales of electric vehicles more than doubled to 43,982 vehicles.Ford sold more than 530,000 vehicles in the quarter, a gain of nearly 9 percent. That included 30,176 electric vehicles, an increase of 16 percent.For the full year, G.M. sold 2.7 million cars and trucks,…