Author: NY TIMES

Executives at Vice Media are planning to lay off several hundreds of its more than 900 employees over the next week, eliminating staff from its digital publishing division, according to a company memo sent to staff on Thursday from Bruce Dixon, the chief executive.The cuts will be the latest in a series of severe cutbacks that the company has endured in recent years, winnowing the globe-spanning digital colossus to a husk of its former self. Over the past half-decade, Vice has had near annual layoffs and mounting losses, and has filed for bankruptcy, making it the poster child for the…

The Chinese hacking tools made public in recent days illustrate how much Beijing has expanded the reach of its computer infiltration campaigns through the use of a network of contractors, as well as the vulnerabilities of its emerging system.The new revelations underscore the degree to which China has ignored, or evaded, American efforts for more than a decade to curb its extensive hacking operations. Instead, China has both built the cyberoperations of its intelligence services and developed a spider web of independent companies to do the work.Last weekend in Munich, Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director, said that hacking operations…

The New York attorney general on Thursday urged the Food and Drug Administration to “take immediate action” and renew alerts to doctors and patients about the dangerous effects of Singulair for children, saying that the current warnings about the drug’s psychiatric side effects were not sufficient.In a letter, the attorney general, Letitia James, also called on the federal agency to consider discouraging the prescription of Singulair, an asthma and allergy drug, to children.Thousands of patients and parents have complained to the F.D.A. about symptoms of anxiety, rage, hallucinations and other psychiatric problems that they linked to the drug, which is…

The involuntary manslaughter trial of the armorer who loaded the gun Alec Baldwin was rehearsing with on the set of “Rust” when it fired, killing the movie’s cinematographer, began on Thursday with prosecutors accusing her of performing “sloppy and incomplete” safety checks of the weapon and of being responsible for the presence of live rounds on the set.During opening arguments one of the prosecutors told the jury that the armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, had treated gun safety protocols on the film set “as if they were optional,” leading her to miss the fact that she had loaded a live round into…

Russian authorities have declared that the opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny died of natural causes but are refusing to release his remains until his family agrees to a “secret funeral,” Mr. Navalny’s mother and his spokeswoman said on Thursday.Lyudmila Navalnaya, Mr. Navalny’s mother, said she had been “secretly” taken to a morgue Wednesday night, “where they showed me Aleksei.” She was shown a medical report on Mr. Navalny’s death that said he died of natural causes, according to the Navalny team’s spokeswoman, Kira Yarmysh.But Ms. Navalnaya, 69, said she now was locked in a grim battle with local authorities in…

Want to create a living fence? Or maybe you’d like to produce bountiful harvests of leaves and twigs to feed livestock, or simply enliven a winter landscape with fiery color?There’s a willow for that.Lisa Carper and Aric Vanselous have a willow for all of those purposes, and then some. In their trove of a nursery devoted to the genus Salix, they have several hundred species and varieties from around the world.But that was hardly the plan. In early 2019, Ms. Carper was browsing online for plants that might work well at the couple’s former New Jersey property.“We had a little…

Stocks on Wall Street recorded their biggest gain in more than a year on Thursday, a day after Nvidia, which has become an emblem of the growth potential offered by artificial intelligence, reported record profits.The S&P 500 rose 2.1 percent, its best one-day performance since January 2023. The Nasdaq Composite index, which is chock-full of tech stocks like Nvidia, rose 3 percent, also its biggest one-day jump in over a year.After markets closed on Wednesday, Nvidia, which designs microchips used in the development of artificial intelligence, reported record revenue of over $22 billion for the final three months of 2023.…

Reddit, the community-focused message board site, took a significant step on Thursday toward going public, paving the way for it to be the first major social media company to debut on the stock market in years and a test for private companies after a drought in initial public offerings.In an offering prospectus, Reddit revealed its financial performance in preparation for selling shares to investors. The San Francisco-based company reported that its revenue rose more than 20 percent as its losses narrowed last year, and that it had 73 million daily users.The prospectus kicks off a process to the stock market,…

To the fertility patients whose embryos were destroyed at an Alabama clinic, the circumstances must have been shocking. Somehow, a patient in the hospital housing the clinic had wandered into a storage room, pulled the embryos from a tank of liquid nitrogen, and then dropped them on the floor — probably because the tank was kept at minus 360 degrees.The bizarre episode was at the center of lawsuits filed by three families that eventually reached the Alabama Supreme Court. On Friday, a panel of judges ruled that the embryos destroyed at the clinic should be considered children under state law,…

The armorer who loaded the gun that Alec Baldwin was rehearsing with on a film set in 2021 when it fired a live round and killed the movie’s cinematographer is standing trial in New Mexico on a charge of involuntary manslaughter.The trial of the armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, marks the first time a trial jury will weigh in on the Oct. 21, 2021, shooting on the set of the film “Rust,” which claimed the life of its cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins. A grand jury indicted Mr. Baldwin last month on a charge of involuntary manslaughter in the shooting; he has pleaded not…