Author: NY TIMES

The Trump administration on Friday officially eliminated a loophole that had allowed American shoppers to buy cheap goods from China without paying tariffs. The move will help U.S. manufacturers that have struggled to compete with a wave of low-cost Chinese products, but it has already resulted in higher prices for Americans who shop online.The loophole, called the de minimis rule, allowed products up to $800 to avoid tariffs and other red tape as long as they were shipped directly to U.S. consumers or small businesses. It resulted in a surge of individually addressed packages to the United States, many shipped…

As much as Amazon may have wanted to dodge the spotlight in President Trump’s trade war, there was no avoiding it for America’s largest online retailer.First, the e-commerce company was entangled in the fleeting spat Tuesday with the White House over a faulty report that Amazon was going to show shoppers the costs of tariffs.Two days later, the economic reality arrived when Amazon reported among the slowest growth ever in its North American retail business.The region, Amazon’s largest, contributed to first-quarter financial results that showed the slowest overall sales growth since the depths of the pandemic, the company reported Thursday.…

This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.Joyce Brown’s New York minute lasted longer than most. A onetime secretary, Brown became homeless in 1986 and began camping on a heating grate on Second Avenue and 65th Street in Manhattan.A year or so passed before she was picked up by city officials, involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital — where she was declared mentally ill — and forcibly given medication. Brown, who was better known as Billie Boggs, was the first homeless person to become the…

This is an introduction to jazz. And so the idea is, if you like it, if you love it, if you show us you love it by watching it, then absolutely, I think there are a lot more stories to tell in a full, fledged-out series.What we’re trying to do with the shorts is try to give people sort of a quick slice of what this universe, this rooster jazz universe, is like.Does Acoustic Rooster represent you at all?My advanced-creative-writing professor, sophomore year [at Virginia Tech], was Nikki Giovanni, may she rest in peace. And I thought I knew everything…

Firefighters battled wildfires on the outskirts of Jerusalem for a second consecutive day, hoping to extinguish some of the worst blazes in the country in recent years before an expected uptick in winds later on Thursday.The authorities reopened the main highway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and allowed evacuees to return to their homes in Israel and the Israeli-occupied West Bank after the fires interrupted celebrations to mark Independence Day.But firefighters were racing to take full control of the blazes before winds were forecast to pick up, said Tal Volvovitch, a spokeswoman for Israel’s fire and rescue service.“We’re doing everything…

When Bill Belichick, one of the country’s most famous football coaches, appeared on “CBS Sunday Morning” over the weekend to promote his new book, “The Art of Winning: Lessons From My Life in Football,” he touched on a number of topics, including his apparent disdain for inspirational halftime speeches.Football, Mr. Belichick said in his interview with Tony Dokoupil of CBS, is really about strategy: What is his opponent doing? How does his team need to adjust?“Identifying a problem,” he went on, “figuring a solution and then executing that plan to make it work.”Jordon Hudson, Mr. Belichick’s 24-year-old girlfriend, tried to…

It was well after 2 a.m., but an aide to Vice President JD Vance was trying to roust a senior Ukrainian official out of his bed in a Munich hotel. He wanted a face-to-face meeting to close a deal letting the United States extract valuable minerals in Ukraine, a priority of the new president, Donald J. Trump.It had to be done that night, the aide said, before Mr. Vance was scheduled to meet the next day with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine at a trans-Atlantic security conference. The Ukrainian protested that it was late and refused to leave his room,…

The growing list of major economies warning of weaker growth because of U.S. tariffs has a new member.The Bank of Japan said on Thursday that it expects the Japanese economy to grow 0.5 percent in the fiscal year that started on April 1. That is a sharp downgrade from the 1.1 percent the central bank had forecast in January.Explaining the change, the Bank of Japan cited “trade and other policies” leading to a slowdown in overseas economies and a decline in domestic corporate profits. The outlook was released alongside an announcement that the central bank would keep interest rates unchanged…

A federal judge ruled on Wednesday that Apple must loosen its grip on its App Store and stop collecting a commission on some app sales, capping a five-year antitrust case brought by Epic Games that aimed to change the power that Apple wields over a large slice of the digital economy.The judge, Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers of U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, rebuked Apple for thwarting a previous ruling in the lawsuit and said the company needed to be stopped from further disobeying the court. She criticized Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, and accused other executives at…

Consciousness may be a mystery, but that doesn’t mean that neuroscientists don’t have any explanations for it. Far from it.“In the field of consciousness, there are already so many theories that we don’t need more theories,” said Oscar Ferrante, a neuroscientist at the University of Birmingham.If you’re looking for a theory to explain how our brains give rise to subjective, inner experiences, you can check out Adaptive Resonance Theory. Or consider Dynamic Core Theory. Don’t forget First Order Representational Theory, not to mention semantic pointer competition theory. The list goes on: A 2021 survey identified 29 different theories of consciousness.Dr.…