Author: News Room

A monthslong, costly disruption to global shipping could soon end now that the Houthi insurgents in Yemen have signaled that they have suspended their attacks on commercial vessels in the Red Sea.But any return to normality may take a while. Shipping lines say they will only go back to the Red Sea once they are convinced their vessels will not be attacked. That may take time as the Houthis have pledged to renew their assaults if the Israel-Hamas cease-fire breaks down or if the Houthis are targeted by Israel or the United States and its allies.Even if freighters return to…

UnitedHealthcare named a longtime employee, Tim Noel, on Thursday as its new chief executive, replacing Brian Thompson, who was killed last month in a shooting in Manhattan.Mr. Noel was the head of Medicare and retirement at UnitedHealthcare, the insurance unit of UnitedHealth Group, where he has worked since 2007, the company said in a statement.The former chief executive, Brian Thompson, was shot and killed outside a Hilton hotel in Midtown Manhattan on Dec. 4. A 26-year-old man, Luigi Mangione, was arrested in Altoona, Pa., five days later and charged with Mr. Thompson’s murder. Neither Mr. Mangione nor his parents were…

Mark Zuckerberg spent all of 2024 telling investors that artificial intelligence would be key to the future of his company, Meta. In 2025, he plans to put his money where his mouth is.On Friday, Mr. Zuckerberg said the company expected its capital expenditures in 2025 to come in at an estimated $60 to $65 billion, a big increase compared with the roughly $38 to $40 billion Meta spent in 2024.Much of that amount will go building and expanding data centers, the warehouse-size buildings that provide the computing power that fuels Meta’s A.I. products and algorithms across its apps, which include…

Taxpayers with income of $84,000 or less still have the option of using the separate Free File program, a partnership between the I.R.S. and several do-it-yourself tax software firms, to file free electronic returns. The I.R.S. also provides free online forms, without step-by-step guidance, that filers can use, regardless of income, to file federal returns.Some commercial providers also offer free options for filers based on their income, but consumers have sometimes found the terms of the deals confusing. Last year, the Federal Trade Commission found that Intuit, the parent of TurboTax, had engaged in deceptive advertising about its free tax…

Good morning from Davos, Switzerland, on the final day of the World Economic Forum. The hottest chatter over the past 24 hours has been about two topics. First, jaws were on the floor when President Trump, during a Q. and A. session that included Brian Moynihan of Bank of America, claimed to Moynihan’s face that his institution had debanked conservatives. The bank is now scrambling to undo the damage.Second, the tech community here can’t stop talking about an A.I. model by the Chinese start-up DeepSeek that is as powerful as ChatGPT and purportedly uses much less compute power. (We have…

President Trump has put unleashing American energy production at the center of his economic agenda, saying that ramping up fossil fuel production will lower inflation and end a cost of living crisis that has seen prices rise for staples like apples, bacon and eggs.He declared a “national energy emergency” on Monday and said that high energy costs “devastate American consumers” by driving up the cost of transportation, heating, farming and manufacturing. Speaking to business leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Thursday, the president renewed his pledge to unlock the “liquid gold” that the United States possesses.But economists…

On a trip to a Walmart in Ozark, Mo., in early January, Laura Modrell was surprised to see shoppers “standing around and gasping” in the grocery’s dairy section. As she got closer, she saw that the shelves, where there would normally be stacks of egg cartons, were nearly empty. “All of the normal-size cartons of eggs were practically gone,” Ms. Modrell said. “I heard some elderly people being really upset.” Across the country, shoppers in grocery stores are facing empty shelves and higher prices for what has traditionally been an inexpensive source of protein: eggs. And it’s likely to get…

Chevron said Friday that it had completed an expansion at its Tengiz oil field in Kazakhstan intended to increase production this year to around one million barrels a day, approaching 1 percent of global supplies.Chevron, which recently moved its headquarters from near San Francisco to Houston, continues to plow money into oil production, shrugging off concerns that demand will weaken as consumers shift to electric vehicles and cleaner energy.“We know that the global demand for oil is going to continue to grow,” Clay Neff, president of Chevron international exploration and production, said in an interview.Tengiz, one of the world’s most…

Two years ago, OpenAI launched the chatbot craze with the release of ChatGPT. Now it hopes to spark interest in a new wave of A.I. technology.On Thursday, OpenAI unveiled a tool called Operator that can go out onto the internet and perform tasks autonomously, like shopping for groceries or booking a restaurant reservation.“It can navigate websites and take actions on websites, much like you and I do,” said OpenAI product and engineering lead Yash Kumar in an interview.Artificial intelligence researchers call this kind of technology an A.I. agent. While chatbots can answer questions, write poems and generate images, agents can…

President Trump on Thursday issued an executive order to support the growth of the cryptocurrency industry, calling for a new plan to regulate a business in which he has substantial personal investments.The executive order, which was light on details, said the Trump administration would create a working group on digital assets to come up with a comprehensive plan including “regulatory and legislative proposals.” The group would also consider establishing a national cryptocurrency stockpile, the order said — a government-controlled stash of digital coins that the industry has spent months lobbying the new administration to create.“The digital asset industry plays a…