Business

Associated media - Related media Workers who have helped lead the organizing said the development had surprised them. “It still feels pretty surreal right now,” said Michelle Eisen, a longtime barista at a Starbucks in Buffalo that was the first company-owned store to unionize during the current campaign. “There has not been a single call I’ve been on today where either I wasn’t crying or everyone else wasn’t crying.” If a framework is agreed to and quickly leads to contracts, experts said, it could be a major development in labor relations in corporate America, where companies like Amazon and Apple have resisted union organizing to varying degrees. “If Starbucks genuinely intends to respect workers’ right to organize, stop its intimidation and harassment of pro-union workers, and en...

Related media - Connected media “There’s a lot that goes into moving these safely and properly,” said Angeline Beltsos, chief executive physician at Kindbody, which has 35 clinics across the country and provides fertility benefit coverage for employers, including Walmart. Will my health insurance cover the cost to move my embryos if I can no longer get I.V.F. in my home state? Maybe. Some coverage could be broad enough to pay for the transport of embryos. “It is likely that employees working for large employers have some kind of coverage,” said Elizabeth Mitchell, the chief executive officer of Purchaser Business Group on Health, which represents large employers that provide benefits for their workers. Would fertility coverage pick up my treatment elsewhere? Maybe, and it’s more like...

Associated media - Connected media Though Apple had not unveiled its car to consumers, the product had for many years been one of Silicon Valley’s worst-kept secrets because it was being tested on public roads. The cancellation is a rare move by Apple, which typically doesn’t shelve such public and high-profile projects. The company has struggled in recent years to find new avenues for growth as its all-important iPhone has saturated the market and people are upgrading their phones less frequently than they used to. Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, has publicly hinted that Apple was interested in entering the car space. The company had also been testing hundreds of vehicles equipped with autonomous driving technology in public for many years. The car, internally code-named Titan an...

Connected media - Connected media Innovation on wheels Has Apple really crashed the car? The tech giant has killed its electric vehicle project as it pivots to artificial intelligence, prompting many observers to declare the venture a major failure for the company. Here’s a contrarian thought: That critique misses a wider point about how Apple innovates, because the company has used the project to power a whole ecosystem of products and services that have been unmitigated successes. Apple invested billions to build a self-driving car. Reports emerged about the secret effort, code-named Project Titan, in 2014, and the company has never publicly acknowledged its existence. That said, it told staff on Tuesday that many of them would be redeployed. There had been an wider internal debat...

Connected media - Related media News articles: Related news Jacob Rothschild, a wealthy financier, patron of the arts and philanthropist with close ties to Israel, who broke with his family’s fabled banking dynasty at a time of radical change in the world of high finance, has died. He was 87. His death was announced on Monday by the Rothschild Foundation, a British charity of which he was the chairman. It did not specify when or where he died or give the cause of death. Mr. Rothschild — more formally the fourth Baron Rothschild — was descended from Mayer Amschel Rothschild, a coin trader in the Jewish ghetto in Frankfurt, who sent four of his five sons to Vienna, London, Naples and Paris to seek their fortune in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. For most of the 19th century,...

Associated media - Related media Odysseus, the American robotic spacecraft that landed on the moon last week, is likely to die in the next day or so. Communications with the toppled lander remain limited and will end when sunlight is no longer shining on the solar panels, Intuitive Machines, the Houston-based company that built and operates Odysseus, said on Monday morning. The company also released images that the spacecraft took as it descended, but none yet from the surface. Odysseus is the first American spacecraft to land on the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972, and the first private one ever to successfully set down there in one piece. However, during the landing on Thursday evening, the lander, about 14 feet tall, appears to have been traveling faster than planned and ended up tip...

Associated media - Linked media Mr. Biden and the F.T.C. chair, Lina Khan, have greeted similar arguments about the benefits of corporate mergers with intense skepticism. Early in his term, Mr. Biden appointed Ms. Khan, who has steered the agency to its most aggressive antitrust enforcement in decades. The president also stocked a 2021 executive order, meant to promote competition in the economy, with directives for the F.T.C. — including to more stringently scrutinize certain types of mergers. The agency — and the Justice Department, which has also beefed up antitrust efforts — have responded vigorously. The F.T.C. has now taken action against about 40 mergers, including tie-ups of video game heavyweights, hospital chains and pharmaceutical companies. About half of those mergers hav...

Related media - Connected media “We have to focus on having the best stores, not the largest number of stores,” Mr. Spring said on a call with analysts on Tuesday. The company said it would start notifying workers later that day at stores it planned to close. It plans to shutter roughly 50 stores this fiscal year and the rest by the end of 2026. As Macy’s reduces its retail footprint, Bloomingdale’s is expected to open 15 locations. Bluemercury, the company’s beauty chain, will add 30 stores, and remodel others. As of November, there were 58 Bloomingdale’s and 158 Bluemercury locations. “There’s less competition there, but the problem is that it’s not clear that the luxury department store really has a great future,” said David Swartz, a retail analyst at the financial services firm ...

Connected media - Connected media In January, two close family friends, the Yale Law professor Ian Ayres and the Stanford Law professor John Donohue, wrote an essay for the website Project Syndicate, arguing that “all along” FTX had enough assets to make its customers whole — a point that Mr. Mukasey echoed in the memo. “Whatever else might be said about Bankman-Fried, he was a brilliant businessman,” Mr. Ayres and Mr. Donohue wrote. Another law professor, Jonathan Lipson at Temple University, said in an interview that he was working with David Skeel of the University of Pennsylvania law school on an academic paper criticizing Sullivan & Cromwell, the law firm overseeing FTX’s bankruptcy. In September, Mr. Lipson co-wrote a brief in the bankruptcy case arguing for the appointment...

Related media - Linked media Ms. Choyleva said many companies will be trapped in a state of “paralysis” while they wait to see how China applies the new provisions in the law. It is the latest example of the country’s heightened vigilance of state security under the leadership of Xi Jinping. Over the last few years, China has progressively fortified its national security and data sharing laws, while warning about the risks of spying under the cloak of business. But the strengthening of China’s national security laws has rattled many foreign businesses and investors. Many of the changes exercise an unclear and expansive criteria of what would constitute a national security risk, raising the possibility that the rules could be applied arbitrarily. The crackdown has amplified the challe...