Author: NY TIMES

Tesla’s profit more than doubled during the last three months of 2023 compared with a year earlier after the electric carmaker booked a tax benefit. But profit from car sales slumped after Tesla cut prices to fend off increasingly intense competition, the company said on Wednesday.Profit in the fourth quarter was $7.9 billion, up from $3.7 billion a year earlier, after Tesla booked a $5.9 billion tax benefit. Without that, profit would have slumped. The company made $1.9 billion in the third quarter of 2023.Tesla has slashed prices for the two cars that make up the bulk of its sales…

Naomi Feil was only 8 years old when she moved into what was then known as a home for the aged, where her parents worked. Living there until she left for college, she learned firsthand, by trial and error, how to comfort and communicate with older adults.When she died at 91 on Dec. 24 at her home in Jasper, Ore., she had devoted her entire career to finding ways to comfort disoriented older people and their caregivers.Her daughter Vicki de Klerk-Rubin said she died of cancer.Mrs. Feil was a 24-year-old social worker, convening a group of patients diagnosed as “senile…

The primary sound of “Polaroid Lovers” is rich and glossy, hinting at 1970s Laurel Canyon folk-pop and the commercial peak of Fleetwood Mac, who placed sparkling acoustic instruments in the foreground of driving pop-rock.Jarosz hadn’t strategized the bold sound of the album; it grew out of her collaborations. “Daniel Tashian was actually the first person that I got together to write with when I started reaching out to different writers around town,” she said. “We just hit it off. And I think, naturally through working with him, this growth and blooming into this other sonic territory started to happen. But…

The Palestine Red Crescent Society on Wednesday reported “intense shelling” near Al-Amal hospital, which it runs, and said that a strike had killed three people outside its offices in an adjacent building. Israeli forces were “surrounding” its teams and “enforcing restrictions on movement” around its offices and the hospital, the group said.The Gazan Health Ministry said in a statement that Nasser Hospital effectively had been cut off by “continuous bombing,” preventing injured people from getting there and blocking the transfer of patients to a nearby Jordanian field hospital. The United Nations’ humanitarian affairs office said in its daily update on…

You may remember that I’ve been blitzing my way through murder mysteries this winter. As it turns out, one Agatha Christie mystery is fun, two are interesting, but once you get past three or four, they start to raise real questions about the economic incentives of the early 20th century.If Jane Austen made a pretty good case that an economic system reliant on inherited wealth is a bad idea because it might pressure your brilliant daughter to marry her idiotic cousin, Agatha Christie added the compelling argument that the idiotic cousin is probably going to murder you next time you…

On Thursday night, the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, which is celebrating its 40th edition this year, was bustling. Banners hung on snowy Main Street, Leon Bridges was performing at a new music venue and the Eccles Theatre was packed for one of the opening films: “Freaky Tales.”And around 7 p.m., some 500 guests shuttled to a convention center about 20 minutes away in Kamas, Utah, for the festival’s Opening Night Gala, hosted by the Sundance Institute. The organization, which puts on the festival and has the mission of supporting independent filmmakers, held this type of fund-raising event…

President Biden will appear with the president of the United Automobile Workers union at a conference in Washington on Wednesday as he tries to secure the group’s influential endorsement.Mr. Biden, who appeared on a picket line with striking union workers in the fall, is expected to provide a keynote speech at the conference, and will “address attendees on the top issues facing working-class Americans,” according to a media advisory for the event.The group’s president, Shawn Fain, has been a vocal critic of former President Donald J. Trump and criticized some Republican policies as divisive and harmful when he spoke at…

There’s a way to classify screenplays for Oscar consideration that would reward creativity and make much more sense. Unlike the current system. Source link

Thousands of people were trapped at a hospital by heavy fighting in southern Gaza, and Israeli forces on Wednesday had surrounded a second hospital where displaced people were sheltering, aid agencies said, after Israel’s military ordered evacuations for that part of the city of Khan Younis.The evacuation order posted by the military’s Arabic-language spokesman, Lt. Col. Avichay Adraee, designated blocks that include the grounds of the two facilities, Nasser Hospital and Al-Amal Hospital. They are among the last hospitals still providing some medical care to Gazan patients even as many more people seek refuge there from intensifying Israeli air and…

Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary said on Wednesday that he would “continue to urge” Hungarian legislators to vote in favor of accepting Sweden as a member of NATO, a day after Turkey, the only other holdout, endorsed the Nordic nation’s entry to the military alliance.The Turkish decision left Hungary isolated as the last country that has not yet approved NATO’s expansion. The Hungarian Parliament, which voted to accept Finland into the alliance last spring but left Sweden in limbo, is in winter recess and not currently scheduled to reconvene until Feb. 15.It was unclear whether Mr. Orban’s remarks, posted…