Author: NY TIMES

At the start of 2024, investors expected the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates substantially this year as inflation cooled. But price increases have been surprisingly stubborn, and that is forcing a rethink on Wall Street.Investors and economists are questioning when and how much Fed policymakers will manage to cut rates — and some are increasingly dubious that Fed officials will manage to lower them at all this year.Inflation was coming down steadily in 2023, but that progress has stalled out in 2024. The Fed’s preferred inflation index climbed 2.8 percent in March from a year earlier, after stripping out…

The federal government’s main auto safety agency said on Friday that it was investigating Tesla’s recall of its Autopilot driver-assistance system because regulators were concerned that the company had not done enough to ensure that drivers remained attentive while using the technology.The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said in documents posted on its website that it was looking into Tesla’s recall in December of two million vehicles, which covered nearly all of the cars the company had manufactured in the United States since 2012. The safety agency said that it had concerns about crashes that took place after the recall…

Ordinary Iranians face a maze of byzantine rules and small indignities in this series of gripping vignettes. Source link

Army engineers on Thursday began construction of a floating pier and causeway for humanitarian aid off the coast of Gaza, which, when completed, could help relief workers deliver as many as two million meals a day for the enclave’s residents, Defense Department officials said.The construction on the “initial stages of the temporary pier and causeway at sea” means that the project’s timing is in line with what Pentagon officials had predicted, Maj. Gen. Patrick S. Ryder, the Defense Department’s press secretary, said. The construction is meant to allow humanitarian aid to bypass Israeli restrictions on land convoys into the besieged…

Russia attacked railway facilities in three different regions across Ukraine on Thursday night and Friday morning, as the country’s defense minister vowed to step up strikes aimed at slowing the flow of critically needed American weapons and equipment to the front.At least six civilians were killed and 31 others injured in the attacks, according to the Ukrainian military and local officials. Three of the dead were railway workers killed by a strike in the Donetsk region. In Balakliya, a rail hub in the Kharkiv region, 13 passengers on a regional train were injured when a missile hit the station. Russia…

The Federal Reserve’s most closely watched inflation measure remained stubborn in March, the latest evidence that price increases are not fading as quickly as policymakers would like, and another reason that interest rates may stay higher for longer.Investors came into 2024 hopeful that Fed officials would cut rates substantially this year, but those hopes have been fading as inflation has shown much more staying power than expected. Wall Street increasingly sees lower rates coming much later in the year, if the Fed manages to cut them at all.The latest Personal Consumption Expenditures index reading could keep the Fed on a…

At least three women were infected with H.I.V. during cosmetic “vampire facial” procedures at an unlicensed spa in Albuquerque, federal officials said Thursday. It is the first time that H.I.V. transmission through cosmetic injection services has been documented, they said.The three were among a cluster of five people sharing highly similar H.I.V. strains, four of whom had undergone a procedure called platelet-rich plasma microneedling at the spa. The fifth individual, a man, had a sexual relationship with one of the women.Investigators still do not know the precise source of the contamination. A 2018 H.I.V. diagnosis in a patron who reported…

Hello, I’m Luca Guadagnino, and I am the director and one of the producers of ‘Challengers.’ In this sequence, we see the two male characters of ‘Challengers’— Patrick Zweig, played by Josh O’Connor, and Art Donaldson, played by Mike Faist — when they are in their early 20s. And they are very good tennis players. We meet them in Stanford, where Art is attending, while Patrick has left education to become a professional tennis player. This scene in particular depicts a moment, and evolution in their friendship that has been kind of diverted because of a third person came into…

Seven rabbis and peace activists were arrested on Friday near the border with Gaza after they tried to bring food supplies into the territory, according to two participants and the campaign group that organized the effort.The detainees were among a group of roughly 30 rabbis and activists from Israel and the United States who were stopped by police officers as they tried to reach the Erez crossing, a major transit point between Israel and northern Gaza.Organized by Rabbis for Ceasefire, a peace movement based in the United States, the effort was intended to build support for a truce and to…

ExxonMobil and Chevron, the largest American energy companies, said on Friday that their earnings in the first quarter fell from a year earlier, pulled down by lower refining margins and plunging natural gas prices.But the oil and gas business remains highly profitable for the two giants even at a time of moderate oil prices.ExxonMobil said that earnings were $8.2 billion in the quarter, compared with $11.4 billion in the same period a year earlier. Chevron reported a decline to $5.5 billion, from $6.6 billion a year ago.Both companies attributed their declines to lower profitability from refining crude oil into products…