Author: NY TIMES

Last May, Fabuwood, a kitchen cabinet manufacturer in Newark, instituted a new company policy: No phones allowed during meetings.To enforce it, the company installed “device shelves” outside each of its six glass-walled conference rooms. On a recent Wednesday morning, there were animated meetings in three of the conference rooms, and the shelves outside were full of smartphones, tablets and ’90s-style flip phones. The 1,200-person company pays the cost of a flip phone for employees who give up their smartphone, and 80 people have acted on the offer.Surprisingly, employees say they like it. Rena Stoff, a project manager, said that while…

Adele Springsteen, who nurtured the budding musical talent of her son, the pioneering rock star Bruce Springsteen, died on Wednesday. She was 98.Mr. Springsteen announced his mother’s death in an Instagram post on Thursday. No cause was given, but Ms. Springsteen had struggled for more than a decade with Alzheimer’s disease.Her son has been outspoken about his relationship with his mother and her influence on him.Ms. Springsteen rented him his first guitar when he was 7, he said in 2021 during his Broadway show, “Bruce on Broadway,” which ran for more than two months as the city began to emerge…

But since the attacks by Hamas and Israel’s response in Gaza, polls show the president losing support among Arab Americans. One poll late last year showed Mr. Biden’s support in that population plummeting from 59 percent to 17 percent, a more than 40 percentage point decrease since the last election.Mr. Biden has been dogged by people protesting his support for Israel at almost every campaign event in recent weeks. At a third stop on Thursday, at the Simple Palate restaurant, he was met by a number of protesters waving Palestinian flags and using a megaphone to chant, “Genocide Joe” and…

President Biden on Thursday ordered broad financial and travel sanctions on Israeli settlers accused of violent attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank, a forceful gesture aimed in part at Arab American voters in the United States who have expressed fury about the president’s backing of Israel’s war in Gaza.Mr. Biden authorized the sanctions with an executive order that goes further than a directive issued in December by the State Department, which imposed visa bans on dozens of Israeli settlers who have committed acts of violence in the West Bank. The sanctions will initially be imposed on four Israelis, who…

How do you know when it’s real love?Not for your own relationship. (That’s a question for another column.) But as an outsider looking at a couple, is it possible to discern real love just by looking at how they interact?For some, it was evident in the way Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs let out a joyous groan as he pulled Taylor Swift into a tight hug and kiss after his team won the A.F.C. championship over the Baltimore Ravens on Sunday to reach the Super Bowl.For others, it was clear the couple were head over heels after the…

President Biden, whose approval rating has suffered amid high inflation, is beginning to pressure large grocery chains to slash food prices for American consumers, accusing the stores of reaping excess profits and ripping off shoppers.“There are still too many corporations in America ripping people off: price gouging, junk fees, greedflation, shrinkflation,” Mr. Biden said last week in South Carolina. Aides say those comments are a preview of more pressure to come against grocery chains and other companies that are maintaining higher-than-usual profit margins after a period of rapid price growth.Mr. Biden’s public offensive reflects the political reality that, while inflation…

Apple has had plenty of challenges to start the year. The Apple Watch has been altered by patent lawsuits, the App Store has come under fire from developers, and the iPhone has faced renewed competition in China.Topping it all off, the company was recently dethroned as the undisputed king of the stock market when Microsoft replaced it as the world’s most valuable public company.But on Thursday, the tech giant showed the versatility and strength of its business, reporting that sales rose 2 percent to $119.58 billion during the three months that ended in December. It was the first quarterly revenue…

Videos on TikTok began to go silent early Thursday, after combative licensing negotiations broke down this week between the popular social media platform and Universal Music Group, the giant company that releases music by artists like Taylor Swift, Drake, U2 and Ariana Grande.On Tuesday, a day before its licensing contract with TikTok was set to expire, Universal — the largest of the three major record companies — published a fiery open letter accusing TikTok of offering unsatisfactory payment for music, and of allowing its platform to be “flooded with A.I.-generated recordings” that diluted the royalty pool for real, human musicians.TikTok…

In another indication that Iran may be seeking to de-escalate its confrontation with the United States, United Nations nuclear inspectors are seeing some signs that Tehran is lifting its foot, if just a bit, on the acceleration of its nuclear program.Rafael Mariano Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said in an interview that Iran was still adding to its supply of uranium enriched to 60 percent purity — which can rapidly be further enriched to the level needed to produce nuclear weapons. But the surge in production that began just after the Israeli military action in…

Some European leaders jested they’d send Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary their hotel bills for the extra nights they had to spend in Brussels to convince him to support funding for Ukraine.Others, less jokingly, relayed to him he was facing the risk of a legal suspension from E.U. proceedings. And a few offered a friendly, sympathetic ear over late-night drinks as he complained about what he sees as a European bureaucracy stacked against him out of ideological animus.By Thursday morning, just one hour into an emergency European Union summit meeting, this carefully coordinated, behind-the-scenes pressure had forced Mr. Orban…