Author: NY TIMES

“I wanted to put an over/under on how many times we’re asked about them,” said Jay Kornegay, the executive vice president of race and sports operations at Westgate Resorts. “Customers and even some of our own executives are unaware we can’t do them. So we have to tell them, and they’re like, ‘Oh, really? That’s too bad.’”A few casinos have gotten creative. One has a wager called “Shake It Off,” which involves betting on a player to score a touchdown after fumbling earlier in the game. But that is about as far as Las Vegas can go, since novelty bets…

CNN spent years trying to compete in the cutthroat realm of chatty morning TV, cycling through formats in the hopes of catching up to breakfast-time staples like “Morning Joe” and “Good Morning America.”That experiment never quite caught on with viewers — and now it is coming to an end.In his first significant programming move since joining the network in the fall, Mark Thompson, CNN’s chairman, announced on Monday that the channel would exit the morning chat-show format by the end of the month. Instead, its morning lineup will focus on straight news coverage, the kind of bread-and-butter reporting that Mr.…

Snap, the parent of messaging app Snapchat, on Monday said it would lay off more than 500 employees, joining other tech companies in a wave of new cost-cutting measures.The layoffs amount to 10 percent of its global work force; the majority will occur in the first quarter of 2024. “We have made the difficult decision to restructure our team,” the company said in a securities filing, adding that it would take pretax charges of $55 million to $75 million, primarily for severance and related costs.Amazon, Google and Microsoft have announced layoffs this year, following tens of thousands across the sector…

In a major coup for the Grammys, an influential artist who walked away from the spotlight made a grand return to the awards stage on Sunday night: Tracy Chapman.Chapman, 59, released eight albums between 1988 and 2008, starting with her blockbuster debut — the self-titled album that featured “Talkin’ ’Bout a Revolution,” “Baby Can I Hold You” and what is perhaps her signature song, “Fast Car.” She won the Grammy for best new artist in 1989, and “Fast Car” was nominated for both record and song of the year.While the song has had notable staying power — it’s inspired dance…

At the Leon’s Centre arena, home to the junior hockey team in Kingston, Ontario, a sense of outrage mixed with anticipation as fans who had gathered for a game grappled with the news that five former Canadian junior hockey players — four of whom played in the National Hockey League — had been charged last week with sexual assault.The first hearing for the five accused, a proceeding attended only by lawyers to schedule a hearing at the end of April, was held on Monday at the Ontario Court of Justice in London, Ontario. There the police, who first investigated but…

The awards show red carpet has become such an access game, such a race of clout and connections to see who can wear the most never-before-seen or sizzlingly-hot-off-the-runway look — the answer, this time, was Beyoncé, in Louis Vuitton men’s wear from Pharrell Williams’s January show — that any other approach can seem like a shock.But recently a different trend has been emerging, and at the 66th Grammys it reached critical mass. Indeed, it’s so applause worthy, here’s hoping it isn’t a trend at all but rather the signal of a permanent shift in the fashion-Hollywood industrial complex.I am speaking…

Boeing said that a new problem with the fuselages of some unfinished 737 jets would force the company to rework about 50 planes, potentially delaying their delivery and raising further concerns about quality at the manufacturer and its suppliers.Stan Deal, the chief executive of Boeing’s commercial plane unit, said in a memo to employees on Sunday that a supplier last week had identified that “two holes may not have been drilled exactly to our requirements.” Joe Buccino, a spokesman for Spirit AeroSystems, Boeing’s fuselage supplier, said on Monday that a member of its team had identified an issue that did…

When Diane Hirsh Theriault’s co-worker returned from lunch to Google’s Cambridge, Mass., office one afternoon in October, his work badge couldn’t open a turnstile. He quickly realized it was a sign that he had been laid off.Ms. Hirsh Theriault soon learned that most of her fellow Google News engineers in Cambridge had also lost their jobs. More than 40 people in the news division were cut, a company union said, though a number of them were later offered jobs elsewhere inside Google.Ms. Hirsh Theriault’s experience is increasingly common at Google, where rolling job cuts in recent months, after a year…

“If I get back in harness, it’s not just about singing, it’s about promotion, it’s about playing, it’s about the radio, politics, business, blah, blah, blah,” he said, with a wave of his hand. “I didn’t want to be back in harness, but if you’re going to commit, you’ve got to commit a hundred percent. So I said [expletive] it.”“Turn the Lights Back On,” which Joel premiered live at the Grammy Awards on Sunday night in Los Angeles and was released on his longtime label, Columbia, drew him in with its lyrics about a relationship teetering on the brink. “There’s…

Voters in Paris have approved an effort to drastically increase parking fees for large sport utility vehicles and other heavy cars, the latest move by Mayor Anne Hidalgo to reshape the French capital with environmentally conscious and pedestrian-friendly policies.The new parking fees are expected to be approved in May by the Paris City Council, where Ms. Hidalgo’s Socialist Party and Green allies have a majority. The new fees are then expected to come into effect in September, Ms. Hidalgo said.Some car owners have complained that they are being shut out of the capital, but Ms. Hidalgo was unrepentant at a…