Author: NY TIMES

Four days of top-level economic meetings between the United States and China concluded in Beijing on Monday with no major breakthroughs, but the world’s two largest economies agreed to hold more discussions to address rising friction over trade, investment and national security.The conversation is poised to become even more difficult, however, as hopes of greater economic cooperation collide with a harsh political reality: It is an election year in the United States, and antipathy toward China is running high. At the same time, Chinese officials appeared unmoved by Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen’s urging that China scale back its recent…

The Maryland Legislature this weekend passed two sweeping privacy bills that aim to restrict how powerful tech platforms can harvest and use the personal data of consumers and young people — despite strong objections from industry trade groups representing giants like Amazon, Google and Meta.One bill, the Maryland Online Data Privacy Act, would impose wide-ranging restrictions on how companies may collect and use the personal data of consumers in the state. The other, the Maryland Kids Code, would prohibit certain social media, video game and other online platforms from tracking people under 18 and from using manipulative techniques — like…

Insurance companies have long blamed private-equity-owned hospitals and physician groups for exorbitant billing that drives up health care costs. But a tool backed by private equity is helping insurers make billions of dollars and shift costs to patients.The tool, Data iSight, is the premier offering of a cost-containment firm called MultiPlan that has attracted round after round of private equity investment since positioning itself as a central player in the lucrative medical payments field. Today Hellman & Friedman, the California-based private equity giant, and the Saudi Arabian government’s sovereign wealth fund are among the firm’s largest investors.The evolution of Data…

Some offstage drama spiced up the event. The star pianist Yuja Wang, with whom Mäkelä was recently in a romantic relationship, was supposed to join for a Bartok concerto, but waited until last week to cancel. She was replaced by the cellist Sol Gabetta, her tone rich yet delicate in Shostakovich’s Concerto No. 1.The orchestra played with a transparency that let the harmonies really sound in the uneasy stillness of the second movement’s start, and later there was such unity in the violas that it truly gave the sensation of a single person playing. Mäkelä guided with exquisite care a…

Israel’s military said on Saturday that it had recovered the body of a man who was taken hostage from one of the communities hardest hit during the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack, almost six months to the day after his abduction.The man, Elad Katzir, 47, was killed by his captors in mid-January while being held in Gaza by Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Israeli military spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, said in a news briefing on Saturday. Mr. Hagari cited multiple intelligence sources but did not provide details. The Israeli military’s assertion that Mr. Katzir had been killed by his captors could…

Russian rockets slammed into residential buildings in Kharkiv before dawn on Saturday, Ukrainian officials said, killing at least six people and injuring at least 11 more in the latest assault on Ukraine’s second-largest city.“Russian terror against Kharkiv continues,” President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said in a statement. “It’s crucial to strengthen the air defense for the Kharkiv region. And our partners can help us with this.”Ukraine’s air defenses have come increasingly under strain since American military support stopped flowing into the country more than six months ago, and future assistance remains uncertain amid Republican resistance in Congress to a $60…

Outside the Staten Island Ferry terminal in Lower Manhattan on Wednesday night, the wind was howling as broken umbrellas blew across South Street like urban tumbleweeds.But, inside the former ferry building that houses Cipriani South Street, Tracee Ellis Ross looked right at home standing on a stage welcoming guests to the New Museum’s Spring Gala.The “black-ish” actress twirled to reveal a sky-blue bodysuit — which looked a little like a swimsuit — under a black-and-blue sleeveless dress.“I wanted to wear something worthy of the artistic celebration at hand,” she later explained of the outfit, a hand-painted creation by Francesco Risso…

Zohar Gilad runs Fast Simon, a company that helps retailers optimize their websites. Instead of offering different prices, they might display higher-end items for customers with a free-spending buying history, and clearance items for bargain hunters. Targeted coupons for hesitant browsers also create a personalized price by another name, creating a sale that might not have happened.“Say if you search for something and you didn’t buy it, you may get an email saying: ‘Hey, you have great taste. We saw you looking for black boots. Here’s a 20 percent coupon,’” Mr. Gilad said. “I think that personalization, done correctly, can…

OpenAI, Google and other tech companies train their chatbots with huge amounts of data culled from books, Wikipedia articles, news stories and other sources across the internet. But in the future, they hope to use something called synthetic data.That’s because tech companies may exhaust the high-quality text the internet has to offer for the development of artificial intelligence. And the companies are facing copyright lawsuits from authors, news organizations and computer programmers for using their works without permission. (In one such lawsuit, The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft.)Synthetic data, they believe, will help reduce copyright issues and boost…

Historically speaking, it’s not a bad time to be the liver of a teenager. Or the lungs.Regular use of alcohol, tobacco and drugs among high school students has been on a long downward trend.In 2023, 46 percent of seniors said that they’d had a drink in the year before being interviewed; that is a precipitous drop from 88 percent in 1979, when the behavior peaked, according to the annual Monitoring the Future survey, a closely watched national poll of youth substance use. A similar downward trend was observed among eighth and 10th graders, and for those three age groups when…