Author: News Room
Netflix spent over $275 million to make “The Electric State,” a sci-fi action adventure film starring Millie Bobby Brown, Chris Pratt and a slew of sentient robots. Had it opened in theaters, instead of on its service as it did on March 14, the film would almost certainly be declared a giant disappointment.Reviews have been dismal. And though the movie debuted at No. 1 on the streaming giant’s weekly chart of most-watched movies, it had far fewer views (25.2 million) than other expensive features, including “The Gray Man” (96.5 million), which was made by the same directors, the brothers Joe…
Mike Howell was looking at his phone in an airport lounge this month when he saw a letter from the attorney general of Missouri questioning whether President Joseph R. Biden Jr. had the “mental capacity” to sign the pardons and executive orders he issued during his final months in office.Mr. Howell, executive director of the Oversight Project, a branch of the conservative Heritage Foundation, sensed an opportunity, he said in an interview. For months, he had been comparing Mr. Biden’s signature on dozens of official documents and noting that many of them appeared identical. Before boarding his flight, Mr. Howell…
Last week, a federal judge in Washington ruled that a subsequent executive order Mr. Trump signed targeting the law firm Perkins Coie, which is also aligned with Democrats, was likely unconstitutional and issued a restraining order halting it.But two days later, Mr. Trump signed a nearly identical executive order against Paul, Weiss. Mr. Trump said he was taking the action to punish the firm for its ties to a lawyer who had pushed for him to be indicted and another who had brought a lawsuit against Jan. 6 rioters. The order barred the firm’s lawyers from dealing with the federal…
Some lawyers said the deal was driven by profit. Others said it was enabling autocracy. One said the move had prompted her to quit her legal job in disgust.All over the legal world, lawyers on Friday were talking about the deal that Paul Weiss, one of the nation’s most prominent law firms, had made with President Trump to escape an onerous executive order that would have prevented it from representing many clients before the federal government. To avoid the hit to its business, the firm agreed to do $40 million worth of pro bono work for causes favored by the…
Versha Sharma, the editor in chief of Teen Vogue, said she had started to pay close attention to Vivian Jenna Wilson, the 20-year-old daughter of Elon and Justine Musk, around the time of last fall’s presidential election.“The more that we started to learn about her from watching her TikToks, or just following her online, we realized that she has a really powerful and interesting and hilarious voice and a way of cutting through the noise with humor,” Ms. Sharma said in a phone interview on Friday.Ella Yurman, a writer and comedian, was able to set up an interview with Ms.…
President Trump announced Friday that the Education Department would no longer manage the nation’s $1.6 trillion student loan portfolio or supervise “special needs” programs in a major shake-up of an agency he has sought to eliminate.Student loans will move under the Small Business Administration, while special education services, along with nutrition programs, will move under the Department of Health and Human Services, Mr. Trump said.Mr. Trump told reporters gathered in the Oval Office that the moves would take place “immediately,” adding that he believed the restructuring — which critics swiftly vowed to challenge in court — would “work out very…
Heathrow Airport in London was plunged into chaos after a fire at an electrical substation shut down operations at one of Europe’s busiest air hubs, forcing the airport to cancel or divert more than 1,000 flights on Friday and removing a global linchpin of air travel.Heathrow’s chief executive, Thomas Woldbye, described the disruption as “unprecedented,” telling reporters on Friday that the airport had lost power equal to that of a midsize city, and that though a backup transformer worked as it should, there had not been not enough to power the entire airport.Flights resumed late on Friday, but Mr. Woldbye…
President Trump claimed on Friday that a report in The New York Times, which detailed plans for Elon Musk to receive a briefing at the Pentagon on U.S. military plans for any prospective war with China, was “made-up” and “fake.”The Times said afterward that it stood by the reporting in the article, which was first published on its website on Thursday evening. The plan for Mr. Musk to receive the top-secret briefing was also reported by The Wall Street Journal.Hours after The Times’s report, Mr. Trump denied that Mr. Musk would be briefed on the Pentagon’s military plans involving China.…
Robert E. Denham, a mergers-and-acquisitions lawyer who was known for parachuting into imperiled companies and splintered board rooms and steering the organizations out of trouble, died on Saturday at his home in Pasadena, Calif. He was 79.His family said the cause was cancer.Soft-spoken, erudite and strategic, Mr. Denham had a knack for being calm under pressure, listening before talking and not necessarily taking the lawyerly path to a resolution. Those traits led Warren E. Buffett to ask Mr. Denham to help him save the Wall Street firm Salomon Brothers in August 1991, when a bid-rigging scandal threatened to push it…
Bryan Johnson, the longevity influencer, has curated a very specific image of himself, but our investigation found that he’s weaponized the use of confidentiality agreements. Kirsten Grind, an investigative business reporter at The New York Times, explains how Johnson used NDAs to silence people around him.