Author: NY TIMES

Shares of Trump Media & Technology Group whipsawed after former President Donald J. Trump, the company’s largest investor and primary user of its Truth Social platform, was found guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to cover up a sex scandal.Trump Media’s stock began falling immediately after the verdict in Mr. Trump’s trial in Manhattan was announced on Thursday, which came after the stock market had closed. Shares sank by as much as 14 percent at one point before steadily recovering to trade up by 5 percent in premarket trading on Friday.The company’s stock is typically volatile, so…

Listen to and follow ‘Hard Fork’Apple | Spotify | Amazon | YouTubeThis week, Google found itself in more turmoil, this time over its new AI Overviews feature and a trove of leaked internal documents. Then Josh Batson, a researcher at the A.I. startup Anthropic, joins us to explain how an experiment that made the chatbot Claude obsessed with the Golden Gate Bridge represents a major breakthrough in understanding how large language models work. And finally, we take a look at recent developments in A.I. safety, after Casey’s early access to OpenAI’s new souped-up voice assistant was taken away for safety…

I don’t need to tell you that Jim Henson’s work is ubiquitous and beloved, foundational to childhood across several generations of “Sesame Street” watchers and stretching far beyond. It’s so important to us that when one of his creations, Elmo, “asked” an innocuous question about people’s mental state on social media this winter, the responses seemed … well, it was a lot.Clearly, his puppets and Muppets and stories and sense of humor do not lose their power with time. But to everyone other than Muppet obsessives, Henson the artist is still a bit shadowy. Good news: Now we have “Jim…

Debris covered a street and firefighters rushed to rescue people from an apartment block hit by a Russian missile early Friday in the city of Kharkiv, just hours after U.S. officials disclosed a shift in policy allowing Ukraine to defend against such attacks by hitting targets in Russia with American-provided weaponry.The shift is narrow in scope, granting Ukraine permission to use American air defense systems, guided rockets and artillery to fire into Russia only along Ukraine’s northeastern border, near Kharkiv. Fighting has been raging in the area for the past three weeks after Russian troops poured over the border to…

Annie’s Ibiza, a boutique tucked away within the castle that is part of old Ibiza Town, for a while was an under-the-radar treasure trove of mostly vintage party frocks. Since it opened in 2018, celebrities like Margot Robbie, Cara Delevingne, Paris Hilton and the mother-daughter models Kate and Lila Moss have all made regular pilgrimages to the store to find head-turning pieces.But these days, their secret is out. Annie Doble, 31, the store’s founder, went from avoiding the news media to courting it as she expanded her business to include a second location in London, which opened in 2021, and…

The annual rate of inflation in the countries that use the euro accelerated slightly in May, driven by a jump in the cost of services and food. Consumer prices in the eurozone rose 2.6 percent in the year through May, compared with 2.4 percent in April.The headline inflation rate was a bit higher than economists expected. The same was true for core inflation, which strips out volatile food and energy prices, which came in at 2.9 percent in May, versus 2.7 percent in April.The numbers for May showed the first uptick in overall and core inflation this year, highlighting the…

When OpenAI unveiled the latest version of its immensely popular ChatGPT chatbot this month, it had a new voice possessing humanlike inflections and emotions. The online demonstration also featured the bot tutoring a child on solving a geometry problem.To my chagrin, the demo turned out to be essentially a bait and switch. The new ChatGPT was released without most of its new features, including the improved voice (which the company told me it postponed to make fixes). The ability to use a phone’s video camera to get real-time analysis of something like a math problem isn’t available yet, either.Amid the…

Take a moment to imagine a small gray rock sitting in the palm of your hand. It’s silent, smooth and otherwise unremarkable.Are you bored yet? If so, that’s kind of the point.Most people will eventually lose interest in a dull piece of granite. So there’s a theory percolating online that if you adopt the qualities of a stone, becoming impassive and bland, then you will repel the argumentative, antagonistic people in your life who are itching for conflict.It’s called the “gray rock” method, and over the last decade it has spread on social media, including among TikTok influencers, who have…

‘Robot Dreams’A dog and his robot friend explore 1980s New York in this wordless cartoon written and directed by Pablo Berger and adapted from the graphic novel of the same name.From our review:It’s marvelous how the film is able to sketch so much soul from such simple lines. The characters are drawn bluntly, just as they are in the book. Yet Berger, directing his first animated feature (but not his first silent film), already boasts the creativity of a master. He frames images from inside a grimy microwave, or looking up from the bottom of a candy bowl as it’s…

“Given how the Trump administration failed to pay enough attention to building partnerships with like-minded states in Asia,” said Aries A. Arugay, the chair of the political science department at the University of the Philippines Diliman, “a second Trump presidency will endanger the momentum achieved by the revitalized United States-Philippine relations.”But Bilahari Kausikan, a former top diplomat from Singapore, cautioned against equating American values with Asian ones.“We structure our relationship with the U.S. much more on the basis of common interests rather than common values,” he said. “And the people who are very upset over the prospect of Trump, whether…