Author: News Room

The lobby of Shutters on the Beach, the luxury oceanfront hotel in Santa Monica that is usually abuzz with tourists and entertainment professionals, had by Thursday transformed into a refuge for Los Angeles residents displaced by the raging wildfires that have ripped through thousands of acres and leveled entire neighborhoods to ash.In the middle of one table sat something that has probably never been in the lobby of Shutters before: a portable plastic goldfish tank. “It’s my daughter’s,” said Kevin Fossee, 48. Mr. Fossee and his wife, Olivia Barth, 45, had evacuated to the hotel on Tuesday evening shortly after…

James Arthur Ray, an Oprah-endorsed motivational speaker who spent two years in prison for manslaughter after the 2009 deaths of three people in a sweat lodge, the culmination of a three-day spiritual program he ran in the Arizona desert, died on Jan. 3 in Henderson, Nev. He was 67.His brother, Jon Ray, announced the death on social media. He did not say where in Henderson Mr. Ray died or cite a cause, but he did say the death was unexpected.Mr. Ray was struggling to succeed as a motivational speaker when he appeared in “The Secret,” a 2006 documentary made by…

Stocks and bonds tumbled on Friday, as investors’ worries over the scale of government borrowing were amplified by signs of stubborn inflation, extending a sharp rise in borrowing costs for consumers and companies.Stronger-than-expected data on the labor market released on Friday intensified concerns that the economy continues to run at a solid pace, stoking inflation fears and dampening expectations of further rate cuts by the Federal Reserve.The yield on the 10-year U.S. Treasury note, which underpins a host of corporate and consumer loans, rose 0.17 percentage points for the week, a big move in that market. On Friday, the 10-year…

Laura Kate Jones, a real estate agent in Los Angeles, is trying to find a house for a client whose Pacific Palisades home turned to rubble this week. The woman and her two children were left with no belongings but the clothes on their backs.Ms. Jones has been scouring the West Los Angeles rental market to find a house that the family could rent for the next eight months, or longer. On Friday morning, she noticed something disturbing on the rents of at least three of the properties she had been tracking: 15 to 20 percent increases overnight.The sudden surge…

The Supreme Court on Friday grappled over a law that could determine the fate of TikTok, a wildly popular social media platform that has about 170 million users.Congress enacted the law out of concern that the app, whose owner is based in China, is susceptible to the influence of the Chinese government and posed a national risk. The measure would effectively ban TikTok from operating in the United States unless its owner, ByteDance, sells it by Jan. 19.Here are some key takeaways:The court appeared likely to uphold the law.While the justices across the ideological spectrum asked tough questions of both…

Mark Zuckerberg kept the circle of people who knew his thinking small.Last month, Mr. Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, tapped a handful of top policy and communications executives and others to discuss the company’s approach to online speech. He had decided to make sweeping changes after visiting President-elect Donald J. Trump at Mar-a-Lago over Thanksgiving. Now he needed his employees to turn those changes into policy.Over the next few weeks, Mr. Zuckerberg and his handpicked team discussed how to do that in Zoom meetings, conference calls and late-night group chats. Some subordinates stole away from family dinners and holiday…

The morning had already been packed with tributes when the “Today” anchor Savannah Guthrie looked at her longtime colleague, Hoda Kotb, and teased another surprise.“Well, listen, we have one final guest this hour who really wanted to wish you well on your next adventure,” Ms. Guthrie said.Kermit the Frog popped above the couch and began serenading Ms. Kotb with “Rainbow Connection,” a song that she apparently sings to her two young daughters every evening.“Oh my God,” Ms. Kotb mouthed, as she held her girls on the “Today” couch and wiped away tears.During much of the 8 a.m. hour of NBC’s…

Venu came. It saw. It did not conquer.Disney, Fox and Warner Bros. said on Friday that their forthcoming sports streaming service — which was announced to great fanfare last year before being buffeted by legal challenges — would be discontinued.The service had been given a name (Venu Sports), a management team (led by the former Apple executive Pete Distad) and a target launch date (Aug. 23, 2024), but that date passed and little else had been said publicly by the companies until the news that the joint venture was ending.“In an ever-changing marketplace, we determined that it was best to…

The United States on Friday announced new sanctions targeting Russia’s energy sector and its “shadow fleet” of oil tankers in what could be a final attempt by the Biden administration to cripple the Russian economy in response to Moscow’s war in Ukraine.President Biden has been cautious in his approach to sanctions on Russia’s energy sector out of concern that shutting off its exports would send gasoline prices surging around the world. But U.S. officials said healthier global oil supplies and the easing of inflation presented an opportunity to exert more pressure on Russia’s oil industry as the war approaches its…

Constellation Energy, the nation’s largest nuclear power plant operator, has agreed to buy another electricity producer, Calpine, for $16.4 billion, a deal that shows how fast-rising demand for power, partly a result of the data centers being built for artificial intelligence, is having far-reaching effects on the economy.The cash-and-stock deal, announced Friday, ranks among the power sector’s biggest, and indicates that natural gas is likely to play a larger role than many expected a few years ago in meeting the nation’s electricity needs. That could undermine efforts to address climate change unless companies quickly figure out how to capture and…