Author: News Room

Over the last 12 months, Google’s efforts to use artificial intelligence to accelerate drug design have achieved breakthroughs in mimicking human biology and won its top scientists the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.Now Isomorphic Labs, the division within the software giant meant to develop and commercialize the technology, is taking another big step: raising money from an outside investor.Isomorphic plans to announce on Monday that it has raised $600 million, led by Thrive Capital, the venture capital firm that has bet big on A.I. companies including OpenAI. GV, Google’s venture capital arm, and Alphabet, Google’s parent company, also invested.The announcement underscores…

Paul Marchant, the chief executive of Primark, has resigned “with immediate effect” from his role leading the discount clothing retailer after an allegation about his behavior, the company announced Monday.Mr. Marchant, who joined Primark in 2009, left after the company hired lawyers to investigate “an allegation made by an individual about his behavior towards her in a social environment,” Associated British Foods, Primark’s parent company, said in a statement.It said that he cooperated with the inquiry, “acknowledged his error of judgment and accepts that his actions fell below the standards expected by the company.” Mr. Marchant apologized to the individual,…

The question posed to Wen Han, founder of the electric truck maker Windrose Technology, was a simple one: Is it accurate to call the firm a Chinese company?After some rambling, Mr. Han settled on an answer: “I would describe it as Chinese origin.”There’s a reason it felt like a trick question: Windrose’s investors include an Australian property group, U.S. venture capital financiers and Chinese state-owned funds. It is now based in Belgium. But at its heart, Windrose packs China’s significant advantages in making electric vehicles.Mr. Han wants to use that edge to sell long-haul trucks globally. He is intent on…

In Washington, President Trump has said he is willing to meet with Xi Jinping, China’s top leader.In Beijing, Chinese officials and experts agree that a meeting between the heads of state must precede any broad reset of relations with the United States amid Mr. Trump’s aggressive approach to trade and foreign policy.But arranging a meeting is already proving slow and difficult.Senator Steve Daines, Republican of Montana, who came to Beijing this month as an informal representative of Mr. Trump, said one of the main goals for his trip was to lay the groundwork for a presidential summit. After meeting China’s…

Stocks in Asia tumbled Monday as investors braced for a week of market tumult caused by an expected announcement of more tariffs by President Trump on America’s biggest trading partners.Japan’s Nikkei 225 index fell nearly 4 percent in early trading. Stocks in South Korea and Taiwan were down more than 2 percent.Stocks in Hong Kong and mainland China were mostly unchanged, bolstered by a report signaling that China’s export-led industrial sector continues to expand despite Mr. Trump’s initial tariffs.Futures on the S&P 500, which allow investors to trade the benchmark index before exchanges reopen in New York in the morning,…

Joe Rogan. Theo Von. Andrew Huberman. If these names sound familiar to you, you’re probably among the tens of millions of people who tune in to the “brocasters,” a loosely defined coterie of podcasters who put men and masculinity front and center.The term — which calls to mind hourslong interviews with frequent references to health supplements, classical philosophy or mixed martial arts — has broken through on social media over the last year, as clips from brocasters have become harder to escape than a full nelson.Though Mr. Rogan and Mr. Von had been peripheral figures in American pop culture for…

Richard Carlson, who won a Peabody Award for his investigative television reports about an automobile company’s brazen fraud — during which he also outed the company’s founder as a transgender woman — and who later ran Voice of America during the last years of the Cold War, died on March 24 at his home in Boca Grande, Fla. He was 84.His son Tucker Carlson, the conservative commentator and former Fox News host, said the cause was pneumonia.The younger Mr. Carlson said that his father, who strongly believed in the role of Voice of America, did not know before his death…

Federal worker unions have sought over the past two months to lead the resistance to President Trump and his Department of Government Efficiency, filing lawsuits, organizing protests and signing up new members by the thousands.This week, Mr. Trump struck back with a potentially crippling blow.In a sweeping executive order denouncing the unions as “hostile” to his agenda, the president cited national security concerns to remove some one million civil servants across more than a dozen agencies from the reach of organized labor, eliminating the unions’ power to represent those workers at the bargaining table or in court.A lawsuit accompanying the…

In the United States, the affordability of eggs has prompted a national discussion — underscoring anxieties about the economy and the government’s role in addressing them. In Japan, there’s an equivalent: rice.Over the past year, Japan has grappled with a more than 200,000-ton shortage of its staple grain. Rice prices have skyrocketed, and supermarkets have been forced to restrict amounts that shoppers can buy. The situation became so dire that the government had to tap its emergency rice reserves.The twist is that even as Japan deals with shortages, the government is paying farmers to limit how much they grow. The…

In 33 years, Marga Aguilar never missed a rent payment on her apartment in a Modernist-style building in the heart of Barcelona. The owner of the building had always treated her and the other tenants as if they were family, and kept rents reasonable.But when the owner died recently, Ms. Aguilar, 62, got a brutal awakening. A Dutch investment fund swooped in to buy the building, — called Casa de la Papallona because it is crowned with a mosaic sculpture of a butterfly — with plans to convert the apartments into lucrative temporary rentals. Tenants received eviction notices, asking them…