Author: NY TIMES

A large oil industry deal advanced on Tuesday after shareholders of Hess approved a proposed sale of the company to Chevron for $53 billion.Control over one of the most prized oil assets, off the shores of Guyana, is at stake in the deal, which still faces significant hurdles.Hess is a junior partner in a lucrative Exxon Mobil-led drilling project in the South American country. Exxon is contesting Chevron’s acquisition of Hess by arguing that Hess can’t sell itself without allowing Exxon to buy its stake in the Guyana project. Chevron and Hess have said Exxon’s interpretation of the terms of…

As artificial intelligence programs shake up the office, potentially making millions of jobs obsolete, one group of perpetually stressed workers seems especially vulnerable.These employees analyze new markets and discern trends, both tasks a computer could do more efficiently. They spend much of their time communicating with colleagues, a laborious activity that is being automated with voice and image generators. Sometimes they must make difficult decisions — and who is better at being dispassionate than a machine?Finally, these jobs are very well paid, which means the cost savings of eliminating them is considerable.The chief executive is increasingly imperiled by A.I., just…

House Republicans on Tuesday accused officials at the National Institutes of Health of orchestrating “a conspiracy at the highest levels” of the agency to hide public records related to the origins of the Covid pandemic. And the lawmakers promised to expand an investigation that has turned up emails in which senior health officials talked openly about trying to evade federal records laws.The latest accusations — coming days before a House panel publicly questions Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, a former top N.I.H. official — represent one front of an intensifying push by lawmakers to link American research groups and the country’s…

A decade ago, the Wu-Tang Clan issued a sole copy of a CD-only album, secured it in an engraved nickel and silver box, locked it away in a vault and said it could not be heard by the public until 2103.The move was seen as a protest against the devaluation of music in the streaming era. But a year later, the album, “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin,” got caught up in the very capitalistic endeavors that Wu-Tang had tried to avoid, when it was purchased by Martin Shkreli, the disgraced pharmaceutical speculator who was convicted of fraud in 2017.He…

U.S. officials said on Tuesday that the Israeli strike that killed dozens of Palestinians in southern Gaza was a tragedy but that it did not violate President Biden’s red line for withholding weapons shipments to Israel.The bloodshed came after Mr. Biden warned earlier this month that the United States would block certain arms transfers if Israel targeted heavily populated areas in Rafah — a warning that has been tested regularly as the war has ground on.John F. Kirby, a White House spokesman, said the deaths were “devastating” but that the scale of the attack was not enough to change U.S.…

Israel’s military said it was pressing on with its ground assault in the southern Gaza Strip on Tuesday despite mounting international outrage over its operations there, including an airstrike over the weekend that killed dozens of civilians.The military said its troops were engaging in close-quarters combat with Hamas fighters and that it had deployed an additional “combat team” to Rafah, without specifying how many more soldiers were sent to the southern city.The military has said that its strike on Rafah on Sunday — which ignited a deadly fire that killed at least 45 people — targeted a Hamas compound.On Monday,…

The idea is simple: Artists upload high-resolution images of their work. A fulfillment center prints and ships editions direct to consumers, at different sizes, on materials that range from wall-mounted canvas and acrylic panels to yoga mats and tank tops. A.I.-powered statistical analysis tracks your potential buyers; a marketing calendar maps your social media strategy. The bespectacled sales representative showed me a summary of one artist’s yearly take: over $80,000. If I signed up in the next few hours, he said — at $1,699 upfront for the basic Bronze membership tier, plus $50 a month for the web store —…

Adam Neumann has officially admitted defeat in his quest to buy back WeWork, ending his bid to acquire the co-working company, which he helped found in 2010 and built into a global enterprise valued at $47 billion before it fell into bankruptcy last year.“For several months, we tried to work constructively with WeWork to create a strategy that would allow it to thrive,” Mr. Neumann said in a statement to the DealBook newsletter. “Instead, the company looks to be emerging from bankruptcy with a plan that appears unrealistic and unlikely to succeed.”The writing was on the wall for weeks. Mr.…

Ryan Salame, a top executive at the collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX, was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison on Tuesday, making him the first of Sam Bankman-Fried’s circle of advisers at FTX to receive prison time.Mr. Salame, 30, a trusted lieutenant of Mr. Bankman-Fried, the exchange’s founder, pleaded guilty last year to a campaign finance law violation and a charge of operating an unlicensed money transmitting business. He is one of four top deputies in the FTX empire who have pleaded guilty to crimes since the company imploded in November 2022.Mr. Salame’s sentence exceeded the five to…

The writer said he was an identity thief — a ring leader on the dark web, with a network of “worms” placed throughout the United States.In an email to The New York Times, he said his ring preyed on the dead, the unsuspecting and the elderly, especially those from Florida and California, using birth certificates and other documents to discover personal information that aided in their schemes.“We figure out how to steal,” he said. “That’s what we do.”Recently, the writer suggested, the group had turned its attention to a major target: the estate of Lisa Marie Presley, which last week…