Author: NY TIMES

For the first two decades of the 21st century, many consumer products on America’s store shelves got less expensive. A wave of imports from China and other emerging economies helped push down the cost of video games, T-shirts, dining tables, home appliances and more.Those imports drove some American factories out of business, and they cost more than a million workers their jobs. Discount stores and online retailers, like Walmart and Amazon, flourished selling low-cost goods made overseas. But voters rebelled. Stung by shuttered factories, cratered industries and prolonged wage stagnation, Americans in 2016 elected a president who vowed to hit…

The two teenagers on the screen trudging through the endless dunes of the Sahara on their way to Europe were actors. So were the fellow migrants tortured in a bloodstained Libyan prison.But to the young man watching the movie one recent evening in a suburb of Dakar, Senegal’s capital, the cinematic ordeal felt all too real. His two brothers had undertaken the same journey years ago.“This is why they refused to send me money to take that route,” said Ahmadou Diallo, 18, a street cleaner. “Because they had seen firsthand how dangerous it is.”Critics in the West have praised the…

It is a lonely feeling to know that your country’s leaders do not want you. To be vilified because you are a Muslim in what is now a largely Hindu-first India.It colors everything. Friends, dear for decades, change. Neighbors hold back from neighborly gestures — no longer joining in celebrations, or knocking to inquire in moments of pain.“It is a lifeless life,” said Ziya Us Salam, a writer who lives on the outskirts of Delhi with his wife, Uzma Ausaf, and their four daughters.When he was a film critic for one of India’s main newspapers, Mr. Salam, 53, used to…

The St. James’s district of London is known for its gentlemen’s clubs, aristocratic residences and craft specialists including tailors, milliners and perfumers. Recently joining them is the 175-year-old British jeweler Hancocks & Co., which last month relocated its showroom from a shop within the Burlington Arcade in the Mayfair district to a renovated Georgian townhouse on St. James’s Street.The 2,000-square-foot site has increased the shop’s retail space tenfold, the company director Guy Burton said, calling the move a “full circle” moment that returned the jeweler to its 19th-century glory days.Hancocks opened in 1849 on Bruton Street in Mayfair as a…

Sony Pictures Entertainment and Apollo Global Management have taken a significant step forward in their effort to court Paramount, three people familiar with the matter said on Friday.The two companies have signed nondisclosure agreements with Paramount, allowing them to look at Paramount’s nonpublic financial information, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss active negotiations. Paramount previously shared materials with another suitor, the Hollywood studio Skydance.Early this month, Sony and Apollo sent Paramount a nonbinding expression of interest in acquiring the company for $26 billion. The two had been seeking to buy Paramount for its studio…

“Swept Away,” a new musical featuring songs by the Americana band the Avett Brothers, is planning to open on Broadway this fall, following productions in California and Washington.The musical is inspired by a once-famous shipwreck: In 1884, a British yacht called the Mignonette was wrecked at sea, and the four-man crew’s desperate efforts to survive, which included cannibalism, led to a protracted and influential legal battle. The details of the ordeal have been changed for “Swept Away,” which is set in 1888 on a whaling ship off the coast of New Bedford, Mass.Much of the musical’s score is drawn from…

The conger eel was the favorite, weighing at least three times more than its eight-armed opponent. But by the time the video footage begins, the underdog octopus had already asserted its toughness, blocking off the eel’s eyes and stuffing arms into its mouth and out the gill hole.“I thought that with such difference in size it would be hard for the octopus to avoid death,” said Jorge Hernández-Urcera, a marine ecologist at the Institute of Marine Research of the Spanish National Research Council.The common octopus not only defended itself, but also seemed to come out on top. The divers who…

Sixty years ago, baseball commissioner Ford Frick received a telegram from a Wisconsin congressman. Rep. Henry Royce is concerned that the Milwaukee Braves will defect to Atlanta for a more lucrative television deal and has proposed a solution: If all MLB teams shared their television rights , then the Warriors may stay.According to the Associated Press, Frick responded in the summer of 1964 that “…a plan to centralize all television revenues is not currently feasible or acceptable” but “is worthy of future consideration.”Now, in 2024, that conversation has arrived. Commissioner Rob Manfred and some of the sport’s owners are talking…

Molly Baz, the cookbook author, and her pregnant belly, rhinestone bikini and breasts will be back up in Times Square, uncensored.A week after The New York Times reported that her billboard for lactation cookies had been “flagged for review” and swapped out for a more conservative image by the company that powered the billboard, Clear Channel, the ad has found a new home. The probiotics supplement and microbiome research brand Seed has donated their billboard to Swehl, the breastfeeding start-up that created the cookie campaign with Ms. Baz. Clear Channel still has not responded to requests for comment.The original imagery,…

Regulatory wars The Supreme Court lifted the existential threat hanging over the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, rejecting a challenge to the agency’s funding.The decision could have huge consequences for a raft of conservative-led lawsuits involving administrative authority — but business groups and Republicans are vowing to fight on.A recap: Payday lenders had sued the C.F.P.B. over a rule that would limit the number of times they could withdraw money from a customer’s account for repayment.The companies and conservative groups argued that the practice wasn’t harmful, and said the way the regulator is funded — via annual allocations from the Fed’s…