Author: NY TIMES

Top economic officials from the United States and China are poised to meet in Geneva on Saturday for high-stakes negotiations that could determine the fate of a global economy that has been jolted by President Trump’s trade war.The meetings, scheduled to continue on Sunday, will be the first since Mr. Trump ratcheted up tariffs on Chinese imports to 145 percent and China retaliated with its own levies of 125 percent on U.S. goods. The tit-for-tat effectively cut off trade between the world’s largest economies while raising the possibility of a global economic downturn.While the stakes for the meetings are high,…

Google agreed to pay $1.4 billion to the State of Texas on Friday to settle two lawsuits accusing it of violating the privacy of state residents by tracking their locations and searches, as well as collecting their facial recognition information.The state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, who secured the settlement, brought the suits in 2022 under Texas laws related to data privacy and deceptive trade practices. Less than a year ago, he reached a $1.4 billion settlement with Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, over allegations it had illegally tagged users’ faces on its site.Google’s settlement is the latest…

Public health officials in Los Angeles County have declared an outbreak of hepatitis A, a highly contagious liver infection driven by a virus that can, in rare cases, cause severe illness.The condition, which is typically identified in fewer than 50 people in L.A. County each year, infected at least 138 people in 2024 and cases have remained unusually high so far in 2025. Officials say that levels of the virus in local wastewater suggest these figures are an undercount.Here’s what to know.How is hepatitis A transmitted?The hepatitis A virus is spread through the so-called oral-fecal route, which means it is…

Jury selection for Sean Combs’s racketeering and sex-trafficking trial was delayed on Friday over worries that some jurors might get “cold feet” before the start of the high-profile case.Judge Arun Subramanian, who is overseeing the case, expressed concern that if jurors were selected before the weekend, they could grow uneasy and drop off the panel before the trial begins on Monday. The decision came after one potential juror sent an email to the court asking to be left off the panel for “issues of personal well-being,” the defense said.Twelve jurors and six alternates will be selected and sworn in on…

Exploring a photograph of the aftermath of a deadly airstrike at a Gaza City restaurant.

So, she said: “I took sort of a back seat, willingly, because I could. But I didn’t realize what I was really doing.”Conners kept working on her own, turning to trusted collaborators and friends for intellectual stimulation. Matthew Specktor, a writer and longtime friend of Conners, used words like “forceful” to describe her. When they met in the late ’90s, before she was married, Specktor said they would go out after work with their partners and talk about books and movies. “She was an incredibly complete, culturally and cinematically literate person,” he said. “She has a kind of beautiful willfulness,”…

Robert Francis Prevost, the Chicago-born cardinal selected on Thursday as the new pope, is descended from Creole people of color from New Orleans.The pope’s maternal grandparents, both of whom are described as Black or mulatto in various historical records, lived in the city’s Seventh Ward, an area that is traditionally Catholic and a melting pot of people with African, Caribbean and European roots.The grandparents, Joseph Martinez and Louise Baquié, eventually moved to Chicago in the early 20th century and had a daughter: Mildred Martinez, the pope’s mother.The discovery means that Leo XIV, as the pope will be known, is not…

In the sprawling flatlands of Denmark’s Jutland peninsula, near the small town of Give, a family-owned company called Welcon has been gearing up to build giant, cylindrical wind turbine towers for a multibillion-dollar project.The project, a wind farm called Empire Wind, is being built by the Norwegian energy giant Equinor in the waters off Long Island, N.Y. But those plans were thrown into disarray last month when the Trump administration, which is skeptical about offshore wind power, ordered an indefinite halt to construction.The pause shocked Carsten Pedersen, who owns Welcon with his brother Jens, and the wind industry.“It’s, in my…

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence start-up, xAI, is in talks to raise new financing that could value it at as much as $120 billion, up from $80 billion little more than a month ago, two people with knowledge of the discussions said.The talks are in the early stages, and xAI’s valuation could rise or fall as the talks progress, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Investors have discussed putting $20 billion into the company, though that figure could also change.The talks follow a large fund-raising effort by OpenAI, the San Francisco start-up that makes ChatGPT, which said…

Every year, tens of thousands of young women opt to freeze their eggs, an expensive and sometimes painful procedure. As more Americans postpone childbearing, the numbers are growing.But there are many unknowns: What is the optimal donor age for freezing? What are the success rates? And critically: How long do frozen eggs last?The answers to those questions may be harder to find. In its drastic downsizing of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Trump administration abolished a federal research team that gathered and analyzed data from fertility clinics with the purpose of improving outcomes.The dismissal of the six-person…