Author: NY TIMES

JetBlue Airways and Spirit Airlines announced on Monday that they would not seek to overturn a court ruling that blocked their planned $3.8 billion merger. The decision is a big win for the Biden administration, which has sough to limit corporate consolidation.Backing out of the agreement will cost JetBlue. Under the terms of the deal, it has to pay Spirit a breakup fee of $69 million and Spirit’s shareholders $400 million.A federal judge in Boston blocked the proposed merger on Jan. 16, siding with the Justice Department in determining that the merger would reduce competition and give airlines more leeway…

The high-profile A.I. start-up Anthropic released a new version of its Claude chatbot on Monday, saying it outperforms other leading chatbots on a range of standard benchmark tests, including systems from Google and OpenAI.Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s chief executive and co-founder, said the new technology, called Claude 3 Opus, was particularly useful when analyzing scientific data or generating computer code.Anthropic is among a small group of companies at the forefront of generative A.I., technology that instantly creates text, images and sounds. Dr. Amodei and other Anthropic founders helped pioneer the technology while working as researchers at OpenAI, the start-up that launched…

Determining whether someone has Alzheimer’s disease usually requires an extended diagnostic process. A doctor takes a patient’s medical history, discusses symptoms, administers verbal and visual cognitive tests.The patient may undergo a PET scan, an M.R.I. or a spinal tap — tests that detect the presence of two proteins in the brain, amyloid plaques and tau tangles, both associated with Alzheimer’s.All of that could change dramatically if new criteria proposed by an Alzheimer’s Association working group are widely adopted.Its final recommendations, expected later this year, will accelerate a shift that is already underway: from defining the disease by symptoms and behavior…

The Vienna Philharmonic hasn’t had a chief conductor since 1933. But it has had favorite conductors.Of the great musicians who have led this self-governing, proudly idiosyncratic orchestra, Leonard Bernstein and Pierre Boulez were made honorary members; Herbert von Karajan and Karl Böhm were given honorary conducting titles. The violinist Daniel Froschauer, the Philharmonic’s chairman, has said that today, the ensemble not so secretly has two maestros at the top of its roster: Riccardo Muti and Franz Welser-Möst.At Carnegie Hall last weekend, it was the Austrian-born Welser-Möst, 63, who conducted three breathless, exhilarating and often moving performances by the Philharmonic, in…

VideotranscriptBacktranscriptKamala Harris Calls for ‘Immediate Cease-Fire’ in GazaDuring a speech in Selma, Ala., the vice president called on Hamas to agree to a six-week pause that is on the table and for immediate aid to those living in Gaza.Hamas claims it wants a cease-fire. Well, there is a deal on the table. And as we have said, Hamas needs to agree to that deal. Let’s get a cease-fire. Let’s reunite the hostages with their families, and let’s provide immediate relief to the people of Gaza. And given the immense scale of suffering in Gaza, there must be an immediate cease-fire,…

Men’s style, if you haven’t noticed, has made a quantum leap in recent years. That has been especially true on the red carpet, where guys have gone from wearing generic tuxedos to dressing like Timothée Chalamet, who at the Golden Globes in January wore a Celine Homme sequin-studded blazer and a diamond necklace by Cartier.Jeanne Yang and Ilaria Urbinati can take some credit for that shift. As celebrity stylists who specialize in men’s wear, both women have dressed Hollywood’s leading actors for awards shows, red carpet appearances and press junkets. Ms. Urbinati’s clients include Dwayne Johnson, Barry Keoghan and Ryan…

At a time of book bans and efforts by state legislatures to ban drag shows, the performer and television producer who is arguably the country’s most famous drag star, RuPaul, is the co-founder of a new online bookstore that will be sending a rainbow school bus from the West Coast to the South to distribute the very books targeted by those bans.He announced on Monday that he was one of three business partners behind the bookstore, Allstora, which will promote underrepresented authors and provide writers with a greater share of profits than other online booksellers do.RuPaul said that this sort…

Michael R. Jackson doesn’t have a vagina. He also doesn’t not have one.“While I’m not a teen evangelical with teeth in my vagina,” he said, “spiritually I am.”Jackson’s spectral self-identity was a guiding light as he and the composer Anna K. Jacobs collaborated on “Teeth,” a new musical based on Mitchell Lichtenstein’s 2007 indie scary movie of the same name. It’s about a high school student named Dawn who discovers to her horror that she has vagina dentata — a myth, found across cultures and eras, about a vagina that has a lethal set of chompers. (The film is streaming…

French legislators are expected to pass a measure on Monday that would make France the first country in the world to explicitly enshrine access to abortion in its Constitution.The constitutional amendment requires three-fifths approval of gathered lawmakers from both houses of Parliament to pass. But since 90 percent of lawmakers supported the measure in earlier votes, the vote is widely seen as a formality before a celebration in the regal setting of Versailles Palace, where the joint session of Parliament is being held.The amendment would declare abortion a “guaranteed freedom” overseen by Parliament’s laws. That means future governments would not…

Apple on Monday was fined 1.8 billion euros ($1.95 billion) by European Union regulators for thwarting competition among music streaming rivals, a severe punishment levied against the tech giant in a long-simmering battle over the powerful role it plays as gatekeeper of the App Store.The penalty, announced by the E.U. antitrust regulator, is the culmination of a five-year investigation set in motion by one of its biggest rivals, Spotify. Regulators said Apple illegally used its App Store dominance to box out rivals.“For a decade, Apple abused its dominant position in the market for the distribution of music streaming apps through…