Author: NY TIMES

Over the past decade, some of Apple’s biggest regulatory headaches have come from a little-known federal agency called the U.S. International Trade Commission. The agency’s patent judges have found Apple guilty of appropriating innovations in smartphones, semiconductors and smartwatches. And recently, they forced Apple to remove a health feature from Apple Watches.Now the tech giant is pushing back. While it defends itself from patent complaints before the I.T.C., Apple has begun lobbying lawmakers to help rewrite the agency’s rules.The company has been campaigning across Washington for legislation that would make some patent owners ineligible to bring complaints before the I.T.C.…

Ariana Grande’s long-awaited new album, “Eternal Sunshine,” opens at the top of the latest Billboard chart with the biggest debut of the year so far, kicking off a season of expected blockbusters from Beyoncé, Taylor Swift and Dua Lipa.“Eternal Sunshine,” Grande’s seventh studio album and her first in almost four years, starts at No. 1 with the equivalent of 227,000 sales in the United States, including 195 million streams and 77,000 copies sold as a complete package, according to the tracking service Luminate. After a first single, “Yes, And?,” went to No. 1 in January, the full album arrived with…

The head of Israel’s delegation has returned home from cease-fire talks in Qatar, an Israeli official said on Tuesday, but talks there are continuing amid another intensive diplomatic push to secure a pause in the fighting in Gaza as famine looms.Warnings from the United Nations that a “famine is imminent” have added urgency to efforts to broker a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, and get more humanitarian aid into Gaza. In addition to the discussions in Qatar, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken will visit Saudi Arabia and Egypt this week to discuss postwar plans for Gaza and the wider…

Three millenniums ago, a small, prosperous farming community briefly flourished in the freshwater marshes of eastern England. The inhabitants lived in a clutch of thatched roundhouses built on wooden stilts above a channel of the River Nene, which empties into the North Sea. They wore clothes of fine flax linen, with pleats and tasseled hems; bartered for glass and amber beads imported from places as far-flung as present-day Iran; drank from delicate clay poppyhead cups; dined on leg of boar and honey-glazed venison, and fed table scraps to their dogs.Within a year of its construction, this prehistoric idyll met a…

Caroline Marie Darmody first noticed Jared Joseph Jones during a February 2016 orientation session for an upcoming staff delegation trip to India. At the time, both worked as legislative assistants in Washington, but on different sides of the aisle: Mr. Jones for Republican Senator Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia and Ms. Darmody for Democratic Representative Joseph P. Kennedy III of Massachusetts.“I was seated across this long rectangular table from Jared,” Ms. Darmody said. “I thought, who’s this big happy teddy bear person?”Later that month, the two arrived in India. “At the time, I was a young, hard-line, left-of-center, ‘I…

The climate law that President Biden signed in 2022 has created a large and growing market for companies to buy and sell clean-energy tax credits, new Treasury Department data suggests, creating opportunities for start-ups to raise money for projects like wind farms and solar panel installations.The market also provides new opportunities for large companies and financial firms to make money.Treasury officials reported on Tuesday that more than 500 companies had registered a total of 45,500 new clean-energy projects with the Internal Revenue Service in order to benefit from tax breaks in the 2022 law. That law, the Inflation Reduction Act,…

A Canadian man who lives in China was arrested Tuesday and held in New York after he and a business partner were accused of trying to sell secret battery manufacturing technology belonging to Tesla.Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn asked a judge to hold Klaus Pflugbeil without bail on a charge of theft of trade secrets. He was arrested after meeting with undercover agents Tuesday on Long Island and trying to sell them technology used to produce battery parts, the office of the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York said in a statement.The second man, Yilong Shao, 47, a…

The climate activist was tired. Protests at the house of Shell’s chief executive had led to little more than free cookies and the police being called to break things up. The same thing had happened the week before. And the week before that. And the week before that.“I don’t wanna be perfect,” they screamed into a loudspeaker in Ellen Reid and Roxie Perkins’s “The Shell Trial.” “I just don’t wanna die,” the activist added, with an expletive for emphasis.It was a moment of one person speaking for many, and for “The Shell Trial” itself, which premiered at the Dutch National…

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel on Tuesday brushed aside President Biden’s opposition to a planned ground invasion of the southern Gaza city of Rafah, saying that his government would press ahead despite pleas for restraint from the United States and key allies.Mr. Netanyahu made the remarks to Israeli lawmakers a day after speaking by phone with Mr. Biden, who reiterated his stance against an offensive into Rafah, arguing that it could be disastrous for the people there and that Israel had other ways of achieving its objective of defeating Hamas.At the president’s request, Mr. Netanyahu agreed to send a…

During the brutal Battle of Okinawa in Japan, in the final months of World War II, a group of American soldiers took residence in the palace of a royal family who had fled the fighting. When a palace steward returned after the war was over, he said later, the treasure was gone.Some of those valuables surfaced decades later in the attic of the Massachusetts home of a World War II veteran, whom the Federal Bureau of Investigation did not identify in announcing the find last week.The veteran’s family discovered the cache of vibrant paintings and pottery; large fragile scrolls; and…